


Locum Tenens

by dasyatidae



Category: Inception (2010)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Medical, Art Museums, Chronic Illness, Doctor AU, Friendship, Happy Ending, Kid Fic, M/M, Meet-Cute, Photography, Pride, Trans Character, trans kids
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-16
Updated: 2018-01-17
Packaged: 2018-12-16 06:17:57
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 41,152
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11822943
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dasyatidae/pseuds/dasyatidae
Summary: When Arthur's kid gets sick, there are no easy answers. But Dr. Eames shows up and helps.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [brookebond](https://archiveofourown.org/users/brookebond/gifts).



> Happiest birthday to you, dear brookebond! <3! I hope this sketch scratches your itch for sexy doctor Eames. I know it's been months and months since you made the request, so thanks for hanging in there with me and my slowpoke muse. :)
> 
> Shout out to jambees221b for the super helpful beta read!
> 
> *
> 
> In addition to disclaiming any ownership of Inception characters, I feel obligated to disclaim any ownership of a medical license. This is a story about illness, wellness, medicine, and doctors, but I am not a doctor, and nothing herein constitutes medical advice. ;)
> 
> * 
> 
> Part two is drafted and should be posted soon!

When Arthur was twenty-nine years old, he became deeply afflicted by all the _stuff_ in the world. In particular, by all the stuff in _his_ world—papers shoved into his filing cabinet, whisks and spatulas bursting from the kitchen drawers, the boxes of wool outerwear and photography gear that had belonged to his father, now living under his bed. A pack of cards and a cracked mug of pens and markers sitting on top of the fridge. Suit jackets and collared shirts, lined up neatly in his closet, so many of them, too many of them, outnumbered only by Arthur’s books on their shelves. It all began to feel like debris: chaotic, ungovernable, _matter out of place_ no matter where it was placed or how carefully Arthur placed it.

When Arthur was twenty-nine years old, his eleven year old nephew Beatrice became deeply afflicted by a persistent, flu-like illness that his doctors were at great pains to identify. Bea had elected to keep his name after he transitioned because he liked it and it reminded him of his mother. He had also elected to keep his American Girl dolls and his X-men comic books, his ten speed and his eight pairs of high-top Chucks—one for each color of the rainbow plus black—when he moved out of Arthur’s mother’s house and into Arthur’s apartment.

The American Girl dolls lived on top of Bea’s bed. They could neatly recline against the pillows and the solar system print duvet because Arthur had taught Bea to make his bed every morning. The comics lived on the big living room shelf next to the architecture coffee table books, while the ten speed was locked to the rail of the balcony with Arthur’s Schwinn. The rainbow sneakers liked to live in a row at the bottom of Bea’s closet, but sometimes they also liked to tumble across the rug, snuggle with dust-bunnies beneath the couch, or keep Iggy the dog company in her crate. The weird sickness, whatever it was, apparently liked to live in Beatrice’s body, making his bones ache, his small frame alternate between hot sweats and trembling chills, and his usually-sharp blue eyes droop with exhaustion.

This exhaustion found a home, too, in Arthur’s body, as he lay awake at night worrying, worked late so he could take time off in the mornings to drive Bea to different specialists and then back to their primary care doctor again and again, and spent hours doing Internet searches about his nephew’s symptoms.

Differential diagnosis was, as Arthur’s friend Yusuf liked to text him in commiseration, a bitch.

Bea’s primary care doctor did not seem to think so, however. She remained unflaggingly cheerful in the face of Bea’s persistent symptoms and successive visits. She was young—probably not much older than Arthur—and very pregnant. Health and happiness radiated from her glossy blonde hair, rosy complexion, and aggressively gigantic bump.

“Beatrice!” she would sing when she ushered them into her exam room for the consultations that she invariably called “chats.” Then to Arthur, she would ask, “How’s she been doing?”

And Arthur would say, _“He,”_ leaning on the pronoun heavily, so that Bea wouldn’t have to make the correction himself. _“He’s_ been doing about the same, but let’s ask him, alright? What do you think, B?”

Then they would all sit down together: Dr. Cobb on the rolling chair with the back support, Bea perched on the edge of the exam bed, and Arthur on the hard plastic chair next to him. Bea would stare at Dr. Cobb tearfully, perhaps in anticipation of having to enumerate his symptoms again. Arthur would watch Dr. Cobb, wondering how the medical professional who had referred them to the UCSF gender clinic and who had a chart of extensive notes on B’s puberty blocker dosing could so persistently mis-gender him. Dr. Cobb would look at Bea with her puffy, round face tilted slightly to the side in puzzlement, clearly wondering what the heck was wrong with the kid.

It was not a very reassuring tableau.

“Allergy testing,” Dr. Cobb said one Thursday. She drummed the perfect crescent moons of her fingernails against the chart she held atop her belly.

“She looks ready to explode,” Bea had whispered to Arthur moments before, as the doctor waddled toward them down the hall. Arthur hadn’t been able to give Bea a reprimanding look; he was too busy biting his lip to keep from snorting. Besides, Bea hadn’t been making many jokes this week. Saturday, he had convinced Arthur he felt well enough to attend Mikey’s birthday sleepover. There had also been a birthday afternoon at the paintball course that B had failed to mention. When Arthur picked him up Sunday, he had looked like hell frozen over—an apt metaphor as he fluctuated between hot and cold, pale and flushed, too sick to get out of bed for school until Wednesday morning. The school counselor had left another concerned message on Arthur’s phone, and maybe it _was_ time to set up a modified schedule for Bea, since he was missing so many classes.

“Arthur?” Bea put his hand on Arthur’s knee.

Arthur realized that his nephew and Dr. Cobb were staring at him, waiting. The doctor’s sunny countenance was clouded by the barest suggestion of a frown between her shaped brows.

“Allergy testing?” Arthur hazarded, attempting to pull his thoughts back into the consultation. “But he’s already had an allergy test. We got the results back last month. They were entirely normal.”

“Yeah, it said I’m not even allergic to cats, but I really am.” Bea sighed.

“I think we should do another one.” Dr. Cobb nodded. “More thorough. And we’ll do the blood test for Celiac’s.”

Arthur stopped himself from running his hands through his neatly gelled hair. “You still don’t think…something like Lyme’s?”

Dr. Cobb pursed her lips and shook her head, her gaze flicking from the chart, to Bea, then back to Arthur. “We’re not seeing that level of inflammation. It’s a good thing,” she added, unnecessarily, and Arthur grit his teeth.

“Anything else you want to share while we’re here, B?” he managed to ask, because he could tell from the way Dr. Cobb’s smile had shifted, the way she sat back in her chair, eyes flicking to her watch, that their time with her was nearly over.

Bea pulled out the little moleskin notebook that Arthur had given him so that he could keep track of his symptoms and the questions he wanted to make sure he remembered to ask the doctor. He flipped through the pages, the expression on his small, elfin face dejected. He was running hot rather than cold today, and his freckled cheeks were flushed; his sandy curls, where they escaped from the drawn-up hood of his sweatshirt, looked darkened with sweat. But his hair was just dirty, Arthur realized; he’d have to remind Bea to wash it when they got home. Except Bea would probably want to nap for a while, would want to curl up on the couch and watch _Planet Earth_ while Arthur did work on his laptop.

“Nothing else,” Bea said, voice small.

“I’m going to send over the order for the blood work,” Dr. Cobb said. “And the referral to the allergy specialist.”

“The same one?”

She studied the chart and then nodded. “And let’s see you back here in, say, two weeks?”

Two weeks: pretty standard, really, to allow for the other appointment and for the results from the blood work to come back. Still, Arthur couldn’t help but think _two more weeks of this_ with a weighty heart. Bea met his eyes and smiled—offering _him_ reassurance, Arthur realized, mentally kicking himself. He stood up and reached out to shake Dr. Cobb’s hand.

“See you in two weeks,” he said.

Her smile widened, and she actually laughed. “Yes, well, and if you don’t see me, you’ll see the doctors who are filling in for me while I’m out.” She patted her stomach in a satisfied way. “Don’t worry. They're excellent. You’ll be in good hands.”

“Right,” Arthur said. “Yes, all right.”

Bea hopped down from the exam table and shouldered his button-covered pack. “Good luck with having the baby and everything.” He looked at Dr. Cobb with wide, pitying eyes. “I hope it doesn’t, uh, like, hurt too much.”

“He’s been watching nature documentaries,” Arthur said quickly, and before Dr. Cobb could comment, he snatched up Bea’s hand as if he were much younger and pulled him toward the front desk.

“Hey,” Bea said in the elevator, fiddling with the straps of his backpack. “At least I didn’t say, ‘I hope it doesn’t burst out of you like a xenomorph,’ or, ‘I hope it doesn’t—’”

“Don’t finish that sentence.” Arthur mimed covering his ears with his hands. “Whatever it is, I do not need the mental image.”

Bea laughed, and Arthur grinned down at him.

“So, chances are you’ll have a new doctor next time,” Arthur said as they reached the ground floor and walked over to the lab office where Bea got his blood drawn. Needles made Arthur nervous, even when they were destined for Bea’s skin and not his own. “That’ll be good, huh? Someone less aggressively cheerful than Dr. Cobb?”

“I don’t know. She’s okay.” Bea shrugged. “I like that she’s, you know, positive.”

“Right.” Arthur frowned. Was _he_ not being positive enough? “Do you want me to go back with you?” he asked, when the phlebotomist called Bea’s name.

“Nah. S’just more blood. You can hold my backpack though.”

So Arthur sat on the waiting room bench with the _My Little Pony_ backpack on his lap. He fiddled with one of the rainbow buttons that B had clipped to the canvas. The button made him think about June, about Pride month, just several months away now. Bea had come to him four years ago in July. Arthur remembered that last, childfree Pride clearly—how he and Yusuf had lost themselves in the thick throngs of Dyke March revelers that filled the city streets. They had inched through the crowd, arm in arm, swapping their bottles of malt liquor and tequila at random, pushing toward some party in the Outer Mission—at whose house? Arthur couldn’t remember. Wending their way through the crowd—dancing, kissing strangers here and there, sharing the tequila—they had never made it to the party, after all, but that had been alright. It had been a good night.

“Ready to go?” Bea had his sweatshirt on, the sleeve covering the taped cotton-ball on his arm, his hood back in place over his curls.

“Yeah. Tacos?”

This question received a very enthusiastic “yeah!” The taco truck by the lake was their post-appointment ritual, and Arthur took some comfort in the fact that it hadn’t yet lost its charm.

When Bea insisted he felt up to being out in the world, they walked the two blocks from the taco truck to the lake and found a bench they could share while they devoured their tacos _al pastor_ and _lengua,_ along with the spicy carrot and jalapeño pickles that Bea loved. Arthur figured the fresh air would do Bea good, and it was a pretty day. Runners and dog walkers crowded the sidewalk, and across the lake, near the waterbird habitat, a dragon boat crew was practicing.

“S’nice out,” Bea said, popping a spicy carrot into his mouth and licking his fingers. “You should go running later.”

“Yeah,” Arthur said. “Maybe so.” It had been a few days since he’d done his usual lap or two around the lake. Since the weekend, maybe, when B was at Mikey’s for the party. He hadn’t had the time since then, working from home and taking care of B.

Back at their apartment, they settled in the living room. Arthur made sure Bea’s water bottle was full before grabbing his laptop; the dog made space for him on the couch with resentful eyes, shifting closer to Bea. As Arthur had predicted, B put on _Planet Earth_ and then burrowed down into the blankets. Arthur could hear his soft sighs and occasional slurps of water from the water bottle straw. After a while—two, maybe three episodes, hard to tell when the credits all rolled into the intros so neatly—Arthur realized that Bea was sleeping. His fingers were curled together under his cheek, and he still had his hood pulled up, so that he was kind of drooling on the sweatshirt fabric instead of on the couch cushion. Asleep, the dark circles underneath his eyes seemed more stark.

 _I should go running,_ Arthur thought. But he wouldn’t leave his kid alone sick. Even if B was eleven, pretty big now, after all.

It was still mid afternoon, but with the shades drawn, the room was dark, lit only by the play of light from the TV. Arthur changed the program to _Blue Planet_ and then muted it. The soft light of the ocean scenes could be a sort of nightlight; the screen cast rippling blues across the walls, turning their minimally-decorated room into the floor of a pool—or maybe, the Slytherin common room, beneath the Hogwarts lake. B would like that. His sleep produced so little rest that Arthur was loath to wake him up and resettle him in his room. He just pulled the blankets up around his shoulders, then rose and walked softly to his own bedroom.

He shut his door and then just—just stood there, looking around at his belongings, the _stuff_ of his life. He thought maybe he should flop down on his bed—or, or read a book—go back to the kitchen and cook them something to have for supper later, maybe. But he couldn’t quite stir himself. The light was different in his bedroom. His curtains were pulled back to show the leafy branches of the magnolia tree in front of their building. B had gotten him a chime for Christmas, and they had climbed up the tree together to fasten it to the branch nearest to his window. The chime was small and made a soft, light sound that hadn’t caused any neighbors to complain, and Arthur loved to listen to its song when he lay awake at night—or even better, on quiet afternoons like this one, when the freeway buzzing and the street noise sounded far off indeed, when Arthur felt a sort of somnambulance he could wear like a second skin, pierced only by that chime or by the sound of the magnolia branches brushing against the glass. The feeling was kind of sacred. It reminded him of summer days when he was a kid, lying on his bed while the mesquite branches tossed against the glass and the bright, clean light of the desert washed over him—and his stepmother made small, comforting noises moving around the kitchen. He remembered feeling in those moments like there was so much _time_ in the world, this deep, deep well of time stretching out before him and behind him, nonlinear.

When Arthur leased this apartment for himself and Beatrice, he had thought about insisting that Bea take this bedroom, the bedroom with the pretty tree outside the window, with the good light, with the sort of view of the street and the rooftops of their neighborhood that made one feel one was living on top of the world. B’s bedroom was a bit smaller, being at the side of the apartment, and its window faced into an alley between buildings. Arthur had been a different person then. He had been twenty-four years old. Fuck, his frontal cortex hadn’t even finished developing at that point. He had fought with fierce determination to become Bea’s guardian and had stepped decisively into the project of changing his fledgling life, making space in it for a child, a child’s needs. No more wild nights out in the Mission. Relinquishing his room in the apartment he and Yusuf shared. He couldn’t quite, amidst all of that, give up _this_ room. When he began to prepare himself to settle it on Bea, his inner voice argued, _you need to have some nice things for yourself_.

Which was true, but he was a little ashamed of himself now. Not ashamed that he had felt some reluctance or grief about the change in his fortunes, his life plan. Now, of course, and then too, those hung in balance with the joys being in relationship with Bea brought him—were so outweighed by those joys. But he felt sad that he had been so alienated from his feelings, so horrified by the way his feelings differed from his sense of duty, that he had packed them away to fester. Grit your teeth and muscle through. He supposed he had felt like he had to push his feelings aside, or he would be his mother; there was no in between territory. He was starting to learn better now, at twenty-nine.

After standing aimlessly in his room for several minutes, Arthur began to fixate on an empty cardboard box near the door of his closet. He had ordered a handful of books in the mail, and they had come in sizable packaging not yet recycled. The box was so wonderfully empty, and Arthur’s closet and the top of his dresser were—well, not cluttered, he was a neat person, after all—but undeniably _settled_ with stuff. Without thinking, Arthur surged forward and began to tear through his closet, holding aloft clothes hangers one by one and piling every item that made him feel ambivalent in the cardboard box. It was satisfying, placing the clothes that passed muster back on the rack.

When the box was overflowing, Arthur tiptoed to the kitchen to secure and un-collapse another, which he began to fill with knick-knacks and less loved books. The inspiration struck him: when he had finished clearing the visible areas of his room, he would make a foray into the more sentimental stuff underneath his bed. He was tough; he could handle it, passing judgment on those relics—artifacts of his father, of his own past artistic and literary endeavors. Surely the things that had once seemed essential to preserve would have lost some of their urgency, their appeal, years later.

Arthur was humming tunelessly to himself—droning, his mother always called it. (Her first husband had been a musician, and she had high standards.) So he didn’t notice Beatrice’s appearance until he had crossed the carpeted room and flopped down on Arthur’s bed. Arthur turned from his bookshelf and smiled at him. They were at about the same level: Arthur kneeling on the floor, B reclining amidst the luxury of Arthur’s feather comforter.

“How’d you sleep?” Arthur asked.

“Alright. I woke up during this part about manta rays.”

“Cool.” Arthur tossed the paperback he was holding into the box.

Bea scooted across the bed and leaned, precariously, till he could grab the book. Then he sat and stared at it, turning it over and over in his hands, as if it was important and not just some yellowed Dover copy of _Demian._ “You cleaned the kitchen last week,” he observed. “I mean, cleaned it out. Threw all that stuff away.”

“Oh. Yeah, I guess so. That blender was broken, and we had six different rubber spatulas.”

“Uh huh.”

“Do you want to keep that book? I actually never got around to reading it, but it’s supposed to be a classic.”

“Nah,” Bea said, still running his fingers over the creased cover with a tenderness at odds with the refusal. “It’s just—I know it’s silly—but all this cleaning—I mean, throwing things out—it makes me feel like you’re going to get rid of _me_ too.”

“What?” Arthur’s tone was sharper than he anticipated.

“You know, for causing so much trouble. And because—because I don’t work anymore. I’m like the broken blender or this smelly, old book.”

Arthur’s throat felt thick when he tried to speak. “I would never, Bea. I would never,” he said, but Bea wouldn’t meet his eyes. He tried again: “You’re not broken,” he said. “You’re going to get better.”

“But what if I don’t?” B asked. “What if this is just me now? What if feeling this way is just my life?”

“It won’t be. We’re going to keep looking and searching until we figure it out. No matter what.” But this answer wasn’t good enough. What else could Arthur say? “And—and I love you right now, exactly as you are. Just like I love the you of last year or five years ago, and I’m going to love the you of next week—you know?”

Bea finally looked up, gave him a tentative smile. “Do you think we could go through my room too?”

“Of course.” Arthur looked around his space, at the boxes he’d filled. “I’m pretty much done in here, for the moment anyway.”

Bea leapt up and then grabbed Arthur’s hands to help haul him to his feet. “Do we have more boxes?” he asked.

So they spent the rest of the day with B crosslegged on his floor amidst a nest of pillows and blankets, pronouncing “keep!” or “throw out!” as Arthur held up clothes item after clothes item, toy after toy. When they ran out of steam, Arthur let Bea use his phone to order Thai food from across the lake.

“We did this when I transitioned, remember?” Bea asked when their Pad Se Ew arrived. “Except I was so young then, I couldn’t really do it properly. I didn’t have as much—perspective.”

“I don’t know,” Arthur said, thinking of the rainbow sneaker collection and the carefully-kept comics. “I think you did alright. You’ve always had a really strong sense of what you like and who you are. I admire that.”

“I must get it from you,” Bea said, fumbling his chopsticks and dropping a cluster of noodles.

In that moment, the small creasing frown between his brows did look awfully like the one Arthur recognized in the mirror. It made his heart kind of pang to think that Bea was growing up like him—well, except, better than him, hopefully. Happier. Aside from this hiccup, the mysterious illness.

“Remember how grandma wouldn’t let me throw any of my girl clothes out? Like, I know clothes are just clothes, that they don’t have to be girl clothes or boy clothes—that they were just _my_ clothes—“ Bea went on, correcting himself, as if Arthur were going to jump in “—but there were some that I really didn’t want anymore, that never felt right when I wore them. Like all those skirts and sparkly tops.”

“Yeah.” Arthur remembered.

“Remember how she packed them up in those old trunks and put them in the attic?”

Arthur nodded. He remembered how his mother had fished the clothes out of the garbage bags they had filled, had carried them upstairs insisting that she would keep them safe ‘until Beatrice grew out of this phase.’ Arthur had been miles past angry, past frustrated at that point; he had been counting down the hours until everything was packed and moved and they could just leave.

“So, those clothes, they live in the attic—I’m sure they’re still there—and those trunks are like this weight on my brain, this part of me I don’t like that’s just hanging out, waiting to jump out at me and eat me up like some—some violent, sparkly lace monster.”

Arthur laughed, though it wasn’t funny.

“This is better, more respectful,” Bea said, gesturing to the boxes of stuff around the room. “We’re letting all this stuff go free.”

 

 _Letting it go free._ A couple weeks later, the actual release into the wild occurred. Arthur loaded the boxes into the back seat of their Subaru so they could drop them off at Goodwill after Bea’s doctor appointment at the primary care office.

“This is cool,” Bea laughed, turning in his seat to pat one of the boxes that listed forward toward the center console as Arthur parallel parked outside the office. “We actually don’t have to worry about leaving stuff in the car, because if it gets stolen, it doesn’t matter.”

Arthur paid for their street parking, and they rode the elevator up to the sixth floor in companionable silence. Arthur’s mind was running ahead to what Dr. Cobb would review with them today: the allergy and Celiac’s tests, and perhaps she would have some different recommendations this time, based on the blood work.

He forgot all about Dr. Cobb’s pending maternity leave until they reached the door of the office, and Bea whispered up at him, “Do you think she’s had her alien baby yet?” And sure enough, when they checked in with the receptionist, Ashleigh informed them that Dr. Cobb was out on leave as of the beginning of the week.

“Congratulations to her,” Arthur said, unsure of the professional protocol for such well-wishing. But apparently, babies warranted boundary crossing; Ashleigh grinned and pulled out her phone to show them a picture of the newborn Phillipa.

“Cool,” Bea said, wrinkling his nose.

Arthur hummed and _aw-_ ed till Ashleigh was appeased, then finished signing Bea in on the front desk clipboard.

“Dr. Eames will be seeing you today,” Ashleigh announced.

The waiting room was, as usual, half filled with older people. It was Wednesday, so Bea had new comics. Arthur checked his work email and watched as Bea tapped an orange-sneakered foot against the edge of the magazine table. He was reading _Ms. Marvel_ and kept leaning over to draw Arthur’s attention to the exciting parts before catching himself and pushing Arthur away, declaring, “Wait, wait, no spoilers.”

Finally the nurse called out “Beatrice,” and B jumped up.

“Let me know when you want me to come back,” Arthur said, picking up his phone.

“Here, you should start _Ms. Marvel,_ ” B said, holding the copy out to Arthur.

“You might want it while you’re waiting in the room though.”

“I already read this one,” B said, like it was obvious, waving the collection in front of Arthur’s face. “I was just looking through it again. I brought it for _you_ to finally read.”

Arthur flipped open the glossy trade copy and vowed to at least skim the first segment before he returned to his emails, but Ms. Marvel’s adventures were entirely engrossing. _Super Famous_ started off with Kamala performing an impossible juggling act of school, family duties, and being a full time Avenger, getting sucked into fighting some gentrification zombies. Needed everywhere, she struggled to feel _good enough_ anywhere _._ Arthur could certainly relate to her exhaustion.

“Arthur?” Nice, redheaded nurse was leaning through the door. “We’re ready for you to come back.”

Arthur shouldered B’s backpack and his own leather satchel and followed the nurse to the usual consult room.

She paused halfway down the hall, hailed by a different patient, and gestured that Arthur continue on his own to room four. The office was fairly small, and Arthur was well used to its twisting corridors by now.

He heard the voice first. The exam room door was slightly ajar in anticipation of his entrance. He could see a sliver of Bea sitting atop the exam bed, but the door was blocking his view of the new doctor. That voice—the doctor’s voice—scattered all Arthur’s thoughts; his fingers tightened around the pack straps at his shoulder, and he nearly stumbled over his own feet. A man’s voice—low and rumbling with an undercurrent of laughter, more than a hint of a broad accent. Warm.

There was Bea’s voice too, joining. They were talking about Ms. Marvel. “I’m like Kamala in that story, I’ve been thinking. My genes must be all wacky, and I’m always falling asleep at school.”

“And your super powers?” the doctor asked.

B laughed. “Nothing yet.”

“Alright, keep your secrets.”

Arthur shook his head to clear out the clouds that had swarmed his brain so inappropriately. The man—B’s doctor, he corrected himself—was probably fifty, was probably married, was _the doctor,_ for Christ’s sake, and what was Arthur’s problem? He needed to get out more, clearly. It was just—he had a thing about low voices. They got to him.

He rapped lightly on the door and heard his name uttered in tones that made him shiver, the man’s _—the doctor’s—_ accent running over the syllables of his name as if they were honeyed. “Arthur? Come in,” he said.

Arthur slipped into the exam room and set the packs down on the floor. He gave Bea a reassuring smile, but B wasn’t looking at him. He was clutching the newest _Ms. Marvel_ open to a favored page and beaming at the doctor.

So Arthur looked at the doctor.

And looked.

And looked.

“Nice to meet you,” the doctor said, holding out his hand. “I’m Eames.”

Arthur felt a little faint, like his lungs weren’t doing a great job of pulling oxygen. “Oh, hello,” he said, vaguely.

The doctor looked up at Arthur and then down at his extended hand. “Right, good call,” he said, dropping his hand back atop his clipboard. “I wouldn’t touch me either. I’m probably crawling with germs.”

Bea laughed.

“That was a joke,” the doctor said, studying Arthur’s face. “Hospitals—doctors’ offices—are terribly clean, actually. We disinfect everything all the time. Anyway, have a seat.”

Arthur sat on the hard plastic chair. “Sorry,” he said, belatedly. “I don’t know where my mind is this morning.”

“Afternoon,” Bea amended.

“Yes. This afternoon.”

Arthur’s mind was, in fact, in several places of which he was entirely too aware, including: dear God, this doctor was handsome and somehow exactly Arthur’s type. Probably mid or early thirties, scruffy beard, a little thick yet clearly fit. Curls of tattoo script and a blackwork feather tip escaping from the unbuttoned collar of a rather loud calico shirt. The pocket of his white coat was crowded with an unnecessary number of pens, ready, Arthur supposed, in case he misplaced the chewed-looking one he was twirling in his fingers and occasionally tapping against Bea’s chart.

“So, Arthur, I had a chat—sorry, conversation—” the doctor gave B a wry look “—with your young man here about how he’s feeling this week, and he was kind enough to go through the important bits of his story, to help lift up what’s important from Dr. Cobb’s notes.”

“Okay.”

“We talked a little about some recommendations that I have and some referrals I’d like to make. And about how sometimes Western medicine reaches its limits. There’s so much we don’t know.”

“Oh.” Arthur frowned. He looked over to B, who was rapt, following along with the doctor with a small, determined smile, seemingly not put off by this pronouncement at all.

“I think there are other things you can look into, that Bea can try.”

“Like what?”

“Like a sleep test, for one thing. That’s still in the Western medicine wheelhouse, yeah, but I think it could give us some useful information. I’m surprised Bea hasn’t had one yet.” He flicked the chart.

“I told him about sleeping so much and always waking up tired,” B said.

“I also think acupuncture could be helpful.”

“Acupuncture? Like, with needles?”

“Even the huge insurance companies have found it beneficial in randomized trials. I could find some articles for you.”

Bea said, “Arthur’s afraid of needles. That’s why he’s making that face.”

“Perfectly reasonable,” Eames said. “Me, I’m terrified of balloons. Absolutely phobic. How ‘bout you, my man? You do okay with needles?”

“I’m a champ with them, yep.” B grinned. “Which will be helpful in a few years.”

“Indeed.” Eames smiled.

“Uh, what else?” Arthur asked, mind unmoored somewhere between _handsome_ and _Western medicine’s limits_ and _balloons._

“Well, I’d like to refer Bea to a functional doctor.”

“A what?”

“Right, yes, most people haven’t heard of them,” Eames mused. Then he launched into an animated explanation, gesturing with his pen and clipboard as he spoke. “Functional doctors are MDs, but their practice goes beyond matching the individual and the disease to a medication. That approach can work really well for emergencies or acute illness, but it’s not always great for treating chronic conditions. Functional doctors specialize in helping patients address the root causes of illness through a stronger focus on nutrition, for one thing. Bea’s allergy test and the test for Celiac’s came back negative, but that doesn’t mean there’s not a diet component to what he’s been feeling.”

“Sorry, I’m just—” Arthur waved a hand in a vague gesture and then scrubbed at his face, covering his eyes and blocking out his view of the room for a moment.

Eames cleared his throat. “Right, my dude, will you give me a moment alone with your lovely legal guardian?”

Arthur heard Bea jump up with alacrity. “You should know,” he said, tackling Arthur into a hug that Arthur quickly dropped his hands from his face to return, “He doesn’t sleep, eat, _or_ exercise enough, and he needs to get out more.”

“Bea!” Arthur gaped.

“I love you!” Bea called, closing the exam door on Arthur’s protest.

Arthur just stared after him for a beat, steeling himself to turn back to the doctor. “I do too get out,” he said at the same time as the doctor said, “Middle schoolers, am I right?”

“Mr. Jolet?”

“Arthur. You can go on calling me Arthur.”

“Arthur, I can see this is hard for you.”

“It’s just…we can’t figure it out. Appointments and tests and more tests, and they all come back with nothing. I’m trying to keep my chin up, for Bea’s sake and, you know, for my own sanity. Every visit, every referral, every blood draw and lab test—they mean we’re ruling _something_ out, right? We’ve ruled out so many things already, so we must be getting closer to an answer, to something workable. This is 21 st century medicine, this is _science,_ for Christ’s sake.”

Eames made a noncommittal little noise; he was watching Arthur rant intently, pen no longer spinning in his fingers but held still against the corner of his plush mouth.

“Like, I know we’re lucky, that it could be worse—like it’s not AIDS or cancer or hepatitis—he’s not, well, _dying_ _.”_ Arthur’s voice caught on the word. “He’s just _suffering_ with his—perpetual flu, which is different but still bad. It’s hard for him to go to school. He can’t play baseball anymore. These things all matter.

“And then you show up and say that there are _limits to Western medicine,_ and you all might not be able to figure it out…” Arthur trailed off, shaking his head.

Eames cleared his throat again. “I’m sorry that I said it that way. That was insensitive of me. I didn’t mean to upset you or convey to you that I couldn’t help—or that I don’t want to help. Just that I believe that there can be more to illness—and wellness—than mainstream medical discourse is adept at acknowledging, and there are limits that show up in a family practice setting like this. I think that’s changing. I’m hopeful. But I don’t want Beatrice to suffer while people like me or Dr. Cobb catch up.”

“No, it’s not that at all,” Arthur said.

“What is it?” Eames asked gently.

Arthur scrubbed his face with his hands again, blinking tears from where they stuck in his lashes and blurred his vision of the handsome doctor’s concerned, intent gaze. “We’ve been—like, how to even explain to you how hard it’s been, Bea going through this, and me not being able to help, not being able to find the right help, you know? And in one hour you’ve been so—so—I can’t even find the words.” He laughed drily. “Listen to me. I’m all like, where have you been all my life?”

Eames grinned. “Med school, a UCLA residency. Other unimportant places like that. I’m here now, and if you think it’s made a difference, that’s everything, that’s _why_ I’m here.”

“When you wanted to talk to me alone, I was afraid—I was half afraid—”

“That I’d have some bad news about your nephew?”

Arthur nodded.

Eames frowned. “I should have realized you’d think that. I’m sorry I made you worry. When I looked at you, I saw a guy who was making himself sick over his kid, and Beatrice needs you to be well for him. I’m not _your_ doctor, but I want you to be well too.”

“I’m fine.” He pronounced the words like _I’m always fine._

Eames made a skeptical sound and shook his head slightly. His greenish eyes scanned Arthur like a medical professional again, not a man, lingering perhaps on the dark-smudged skin beneath his eyes, the patch of stubble he’d missed on one pallid cheek, the nearly-healed cold sore brought on by stress at the edge of his lower lip. Well, there was no way he could be a harsher critic than Arthur was when he looked in the mirror, so let him look, Arthur thought.

“When was your last physical?”

“What? Ah, last year, I think. Maybe the year before. I don’t get sick.”

“You’ll let me look you over real quick?”

“Oh—” Arthur opened his mouth to protest, but Eames was already coming at him with a blood pressure cuff and a forehead thermometer, gesturing for him to sit on the exam bed. “I thought nurses did this stuff.”

“If it’ll make you more cooperative to pretend I’m a nurse, we can play nurse and patient instead of doctor and patient. I don’t mind.”

“I don’t have to take my clothes off, do I?” Arthur flushed. Where had _that_ question come from?

Eames, clearly wondering the same thing, bit back a laugh. “You’ll do as you are.”

He was already sweeping the thermometer from the center of Arthur’s forehead over and across his temple. The instrument beeped, and Eames paused with the back of his hand just millimeters from Arthur’s skin. “98.8, which is fine, but you feel a little hot.”

“It’s just you,” Arthur said, feeling a nervous sweat coming on. Jesus.

Eames velcro-ed the blood pressure cuff around the bicep Arthur had shrugged free of his jacket.

“I mean,” Arthur stammered. “You know what I mean. It’s just because you’re close—crowding me, that is.”

“Quite alright, love,” Eames said, as if Arthur were a little old lady in need of reassurance. “One hundred thirty over seventy-five. Being nervous doesn’t affect the reading too much, don’t worry. Let me get out of your space.” Eames took a step away, then approached Arthur again with a pen light. “Well, before I do, I’m going to check your pupils, okay? Look at me.”

Eames aimed the light toward the corner of his eyes.

Arthur was probably supposed to look at the doctor’s nose, but he stared straight into the doctor’s eyes instead; they were a mottled hazel-green, crinkled at the corners with lines from laughing.

“Good. Let’s see your tongue,” Eames commanded, dropping the light.

_“What?”_

“Just stick it out. I want to see if its symmetrical.”

“What on Earth will that do for you?”

Eames chuckled. “You’re a riot. It’s another way to check for neurological impairment. Standard procedure, I assure you.”

Suspicious, Arthur stuck out his tongue.

“Mm.” Eames’s pretty green eyes crossed slightly as he leaned forward to stare, and Arthur found himself holding his breath.

He drew back his tongue. “Well?”

“Seems symmetrical.” Eames’s mouth had relaxed, but his eyes were still laughing. “How are you feeling now? Think you can stand me listening to your heart?”

Arthur sighed. His heart was rabbiting like he was facing down a freight train, and Eames wanted to listen. “I’ll manage. Carry on.”

Eames pressed the stethoscope to Arthur’s back and instructed him to _breathe_ in his low, rumble of a voice. Arthur tried to tried to push past his self-conscious confusion and enjoy the sensation of an adept professional taking care of him. _Breathe._ He liked the busy silence between them as Eames listened attentively to his heart and touched him just a little bit, no more than was necessary. Arthur followed his instructions and focused on the sensation of his breath, tried to return from aroused panic to calm _._

“Good,” Eames said finally, stepping from behind Arthur and settling in front of him. He slung the stethoscope around his neck like a doctor in a television show. “Now, how about a game of twenty questions. How’s your sleep?”

“Uh. Fine.”

“How many hours do you sleep a night?”

“Really?”

“Go on. There’s no wrong answers.”

“Five? Six?”

“Hm. I lied. That’s sort of a wrong answer. Get more sleep!”

Arthur rolled his eyes.

“Any changes in your sleep?” Eames continued.

Arthur heaved a sigh. “It’s gotten worse since Bea’s been sick. I worry. Wake up in the middle of the night, have trouble falling asleep, that sort of thing.”

“And work? How’s your work-life balance?”

“It’s alright. I don’t work too much, so I can spend time with Bea. Especially now.”

“What kind of work do you do?” Eames tilted his head to the side, regarding Arthur as if trying to guess; he had a pen in hand again and seemed to be barely refraining from chewing on it, which was not only unhygienic but also totally distracting. Like of all people to have an oral fixation, Arthur thought; he must drive half his patients into heart palpitations.

“Arthur?”

He had been staring, fuck. “Uh, I do QA work for a big agency that supports children’s emotional and behavioral health. Sentinel—you probably know it?”

Eames shook his head. “I’ve heard it mentioned, but I’m not as well versed in the area's mental health resources as I should be.”

“Oh. Well, I review the therapists’ mental health notes and assessments and stuff so we get insurance and MediCal reimbursement, you know.” He smirked at Eames’s surprise. “Not what you were expecting.”

Eames shrugged. “I didn’t know what to expect, but that doesn’t—not fit. I mean, it doesn’t sound too stressful. You were in direct care before?” he hazarded.

“Doing family reunification work with kids in foster care, and _that_ was stressful,” Arthur confirmed. “QA work—well, it’s necessary, even if it’s not exciting, and I’m good at it. Plus, I can work in the office or from home—hell, I could work from a beach. That’s what sold me on it,” he confessed.

“Working from the beach? Do you and Bea live—ah—out by the beach, then?”

“We live by the lake. Maybe someday we’ll make it further west.” Arthur hesitated, then added, “The beach is expensive for a single parent.”

They were quiet for a moment.

“Do you do anything to manage or relieve stress?” Eames asked. “Exercise, get your heart rate up? That sort of thing?”

“I run,” Arthur answered quickly; he wasn’t even going to go anywhere else with _that_ question.

Eames nodded and regarded him; he was leaning against the counter, so they were level with each other with Arthur perched on the exam bed. “Alright, Arthur. Looks like you’ll live. Your blood pressure’s a little higher than I’d like to see for a runner, but it’s still within normal range, and it makes sense given the stress you’re experiencing.” He folded his arms, which seemed to signal that the examination was over. “Thanks for indulging me.”

Arthur snorted. “What, finished digging into my personal life already? You’re not going to ask me if I’m sexually active?”

Eames raised his eyebrows and grinned. “Thought it might be crossing a line or two, but by all means, share if you’re so inclined.”

The truth in Eames’s banter _—crossing a line or two—_ hit Arthur like a slap. “Fuck, I’m sorry,” he scrambled to say. “I don’t know what my problem is today. I keep saying these things like—like my life is a few cheesy innuendoes and a funk guitar riff away from becoming a porno chic scene. I just really haven’t been to the doctor in a while, I guess.” _I’ve never been to a doctor like_ you _before,_ Arthur meant.

Eames was looking at Arthur like he was Christmas. “It’s, ah, quite alright. Happens all the time. Common side effect of my professional brilliance and ruthless charm.”  

Arthur laughed, relieved. “You have that thing—what’s it called?—good bedside manner, you know that?”

Eames’s smile shifted, like a piece of music slipping into a brighter key. “Thank you.”

A nurse tapped on the door and called, “Dr. Eames? Your two o’clock is ready.”

“Got it. Thanks, love,” he said rather absently, still staring at Arthur like Arthur was actually something to look at, a wonderful puzzle.

“I guess I’ll be going then.” Arthur hopped down from the exam table, but he had misjudged how closely the movement would bring him to Eames in the small room. They were standing face to face, and Eames was still studying him, his pretty lips curved in a smile.

Arthur felt kind of breathless; surely the funk guitar was going to kick up any minute now. He swallowed. “Thanks for everything today,” he said in a mostly even voice.

Eames nodded. “Of course. Just keep taking care of yourself, darling, okay? Having a sick kid is hard on parents’ health too. Talk to someone if the sleep issues continue. I’ll make those referrals we spoke about, and we’ll see you back here in a few weeks, alright?”

Very professional. Right. Okay. _Get it together,_ Arthur told himself as he bent to pick up his computer bag.

Eames held the exam door open for him, and Arthur focused on walking to the front office without looking back over his shoulder or tripping over his feet.

 _What just happened?_ he wondered. _Fuck, did I accidentally hit on my kid’s doctor? Like, is that even legal?_

Arthur couldn’t help it: he snatched one quick glimpse over his shoulder as he reached the receptionist’s counter, expecting Dr. Eames to have vanished to his two o’clock. But Eames was leaning in the doorway of the exam room watching him. He raised a hand to wave at Arthur.

 _Maybe it’s not unethical,_ Arthur decided. _Maybe it’s just bad form, like hitting on your barista._

There was a loud _pop!,_ and Arthur realized that Ashleigh had snapped her gum in his direction. The office schedule was on her screen, and her shiny black nails hovered over the keyboard expectantly. “You want to schedule another appointment with the doctor?”

“Yeah, I do.” Arthur waved back at Eames. _Maybe it’s not bad form if the doctor’s actually into you._ He turned toward Ashleigh and pulled his planner from his bag, trying to look nonchalant as he asked, “So, how soon is he available?”

On the nearby waiting room couch, Bea looked up from his comic and laughed.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oops, I am truly bad at the maths, and this piece is going to be three chapters instead of two! >:o
> 
> Thank you, thank you, thank you darling oceaxe for the beta!

 

His friend Ari’s set had ended hours ago, and Arthur had tumbled into bed as soon as he’d gotten home and called his babysitter Emily a Lyft, his head swimming with expensive vodka tonics and the aftershock echoes of deep house beats. After a cycle or two of sleep, Arthur woke to the sound of his wind chime clanging with an abandon that foretold rainstorms or the neighbor’s cat in the tree. His head throbbed, less from the vodka, he thought, and more from how he’d been clenching his teeth, his neck buried beneath his pillows at an off angle. Arthur sat up and rummaged blindly with one hand in the drawer of his nightstand, fingers seizing and pushing aside two bottles of lube before he found the ibuprofen. With an apology to his liver, Arthur swallowed a couple painkillers and lay back on his bed to wait for his head to clear. Sleep seemed to have retreated from him, but he thought if he lay quietly it might creep back again. Fuck, his neck was sore; despite the new doctor’s encouragement and admonition to _take care,_ Arthur felt like he had lived through the weekend with his shoulders up around his ears. Not even Ari’s birthday night out with their friends, getting blitzed and dancing and listening to Ari spin, had helped him fully _relax._

Arthur could feel the nagging pain in his neck and skull lurking beneath the dulling agents of the painkiller and the alcohol. The glass of water he’d downed and a few minutes spent massaging the taut muscles of his neck didn’t seem to be helping. He persisted, determined to knead out the worst of the tension.

 _Eames,_ he thought as he arched his neck to better dig his fingers into the soreness. All of a sudden his mind was full of the image: Eames close behind him, running those large hands over Arthur’s back and up to scratch Arthur’s scalp, then dropping to massage his shoulders, those gentle, calloused hands finding and loosening the knots more adeptly than Arthur’s.

 _He’s a doctor, not a massage therapist,_ the voice inside Arthur’s head criticized.

 _Shut it,_ Arthur replied, pushing the nagging voice away. _He has healing hands. I could tell. Just let me—let yourself—have this._

Arthur’s touch lightened into a caress as he moved his hands down his chest and to his hipbones, pushing down the waistband of his sweats to tease his swelling cock with fingertips, then to curl palm and fingers around himself and stroke—not the brisk, utilitarian movements that were his default after a long day but a touch light and exploratory, as if a stranger’s.

Arthur pictured Eames in the exam room, Eames crowding him on the exam bed, standing between his legs, his large hands running up Arthur’s thighs to pull at the button of his jeans—no, Eames leaning against the counter, hands fidgeting with his clipboard and the hem of his white coat, watching Arthur peel off his clothes. He needed to get undressed for his physical, of course. That was why he was stripping off his pants, his shirt, every stitch, until he was shivering, exposed in front of the doctor. _Now_ Eames stepped forward between Arthur’s legs. The cold vinyl and crinkling paper of the exam bed pressed against his ass, which Eames was squeezing, caressing with his large, strong hands.

And oh, fuck, Eames’s voice, low and commanding...

“Tell me, Arthur,” Eames purred, raising his hands to palpate Arthur’s shoulders and the muscles of his neck. “Any tenderness?”

“It’s good—I mean, I feel fine.”

“A little specificity, darling. On a scale of one to ten, with one being no discomfort at all and ten being the worst pain, how does this feel—?”

Eames leaned forward and took Arthur’s earlobe between his teeth; he bit gently, then harder until Arthur sucked in breath with a hiss. “Your scale’s wrong,” he gasped.

“Oh?”

“It’s not pain, when you—oh! You feel so—”

Eames kissed Arthur’s neck—first a light brush of his full lips against Arthur’s goose-prickled skin, then sucking and nipping what would surely become vivid, mottled purple bruises. Off balance, Arthur could only melt, pliant, and let Eames’s large hands span his waist, holding him upright. Eames tipped him back and spread him on the exam bed.

“Your heart’s racing,” he murmured, licking Arthur’s pulse point. “You’re doing fine. It’s normal to be nervous during an exam.” Eames wrapped his fingers around Arthur’s cock, lightly, with clinical care. But his slight trembling betrayed how much he wanted Arthur. “Relax. Let me take care of you.”

In bed, Arthur arched back against his sheets, squeezing his eyes shut, chasing the imagined sensation. His hand sped up around his cock, and the scene shifted. The doctor’s office became his old, delicious fantasy—imagined a thousand times, never enacted.

 

One Pride—not that last childfree Pride, but two years before Bea—he had told Yusuf about this particular fantasy. He and Yusuf were eating breakfast-before-bed in their apartment after a night of partying that had stretched on until daybreak and culminated in a couple hours’ worth of chemical-fueled making out on their shared couch…

“As a chemist, I am telling you, that molly was a tad speedy.”

Arthur paused, lifting himself from Yusuf’s mouth to take stock of the exhausting marathon of his thoughts, which seemed to fuzz out and then accelerate to the rhythm of Yusuf’s tongue against his. “Right you are,” he said. “Damn. Is it really nine in the morning?”

“Nah. Couldn’t be. That’d be silly.” Yusuf pulled him back down, licked up his neck and along his jaw.

They just kept making out and making out because every time one of them would work his way inside the other’s pants, the other would kind of space out or doze off; also, neither of them could really stay hard for long.

“Doesn’t matter. Feels good,” Arthur said, when Yusuf finally pointed out these facts.

“I dunno, man. Maybe we shouldn’t be doing this.”

“Yeah, shit. You’re, like, my only friend.” Arthur kind of, well, _giggled._

“Don’t say that. That is _not_ true.” Yusuf frowned, as if working through a calculation. “You are, however, my only _best_ friend. And my only roommate.”

“That I am _._ ” Arthur tugged on his curls. They were nice. They were so long he could wrap them around his fingers. “We’re being really silly.” He laughed. He was kind of proud of them for these peak levels of silliness. He wasn’t often very silly, he knew, with chagrin that his drug-softened self was more inclined to admit.

“Anyway, want to call it good and make some omelets?” Yusuf traced a finger down Arthur’s nose and over his lips.

“Omelets? How are you even hungry? Besides, you’re falling asleep.” Arthur tugged on his handful of curls again, and Yusuf smiled at him, blinking drowsily.

“Mm. I don’t think I’m going to be able to sleep well until I force myself to eat something.”

“Fair enough.”

So they were sitting at the kitchen table eating omelets.

“Tell me something,” Yusuf said, tone conversational. He speared a button mushroom with his fork and dunked it in the pool of Tabasco-ketchup he had created at the edge of his plate.

“Anyfing,” Arthur responded immediately, mouth full. He just couldn’t stop inhaling his eggs; he was so fucking hungry, all of a sudden.

Yusuf laughed at him. “Speedy, rolling Arthur is extra adorable,” he said. “Now I feel bad stealing you away from all your hopefuls at that club. Like I am robbing all your potential boyfriends of a rare delight.”

“Whatever. Don’t want any boyfriends. I just want you to be my best friend.”

“My heart is fluttering.”

“ _Shut up_.”

“No, seriously.” Yusuf put his hands on the table very seriously indeed. “I will be your best friend forever,” he declared. “I love you, Arthur.”

Arthur nearly choked on his eggs. “Really?”

“Yeah.”

They ate in silence for a few minutes, neither of them remembering to get up and flip the record Arthur had put on. Dust motes swam in mid-morning sunbeams; the sun stole into the room through the long leaves of their hanging spider plants, making the coffee-stained wood of the table glow.  

“Tell me something,” Yusuf said again. “You got this look in your eyes. What were you thinking about?”

“When? Just now?”

“No, like, when we were on the couch.”

“Mm, yeah,” Arthur admitted. “There was this point where I—I kind of slipped into this fantasy. It’s just something I end up thinking about a lot when I’m getting off.”

“Yeah?”

After Arthur told him about the fantasy, Yusuf nodded sagely. “Hot,” he said. “So, how does it go, when you actually—”

“I’ve never actually,” Arthur cut in.

“Never? But it’s not even like that…” Yusuf trailed off.

Arthur shrugged. “I know. I don’t really talk about stuff like that with the guys I get with. We just kind of do whatever, and—yeah.”

“Dude,” Yusuf said. “Fucking hell. You can’t let those randos do you like that. Maybe we should go back to the couch.” But he said the words around a large yawn.

Arthur started to laugh at him, but his laugh turned into a yawn too. “Nah, I’m calling it,” he said. “Let’s go to sleep.”

They hugged goodnight and staggered to their separate rooms to sleep for a long time, not nearly long enough.

They kept on being best friends. Arthur didn’t worry about the fact that he had spilled his wank fantasy to Yusuf, but part of their conversation did bother him, until he finally brought it up again, a couple weeks later. They were sitting on the couch, watching a Sharks game.

“You told me you _loved_ me,” Arthur said, hesitatingly. The back of his neck was prickly, and his throat felt thick.

Yusuf just put an arm around his shoulder, then stole his beer to open it for him before he could fidget off its tab. “Well, yeah. And I’ll tell you that anytime, you know?”

Arthur hadn’t known; he must have looked surprised, because Yusuf pulled him closer—into a nearly-beer-sloshing side hug. “I love you, you goofball,” he said, kissing Arthur’s head just above his ear.

“I love you too,” Arthur replied.

He could still remember how he had formed the words carefully, tentatively—not because he didn’t mean them, but because he was so unused to saying them for their own sake, as a free, delighted declaration of regard. _I love you_ had always been an appeasement, words spoken _to manage_ another human. To try to keep them from verbally whaling on him, from freaking out.

Funny—years later with Bea, the words came so easily to him, perfectly fitting the emotions that welled up in him when his nephew got the lead in the class play, read aloud to Arthur from a favorite book, or slayed at Mario Kart. Rising to his lips when Bea gave Arthur a hug, climbed out of the car to go to school, or smiled at him in a doctor’s office. And Arthur doesn’t _have_ to say the words; it’s not a terrible, insufficient pronouncement, just an easy truth. _I love you, I love you, I love you._

 

But back to Eames, back to the fantasy.

It always started like that scene at the beginning of _Moby Dick,_ where Ishmael and Queequeg discover each other in bed. Arthur imagined blinking awake drowsily as a muscled, naked body slipped into bed behind him, making the mattress dip with his weight. He always imagined, like, a hostel or dorm or fucking whatever; what mattered was that it was dark in the room, and before Arthur and the man could turn to face each other, surprise turned to opportunism. He pressed his chilled body against Arthur’s warmth, and Arthur found himself bucking against him, sleep daze swamped by sudden adrenaline. _Who are you? What are you doing here?_ The man’s—well, Eames’s—hum of approval as he ran his hands over Arthur’s body— _oh, hello, darling—_ encountering Arthur’s already hard cock. That intoxicating, low rumble of a voice. Those sure, calloused hands and soft lips. Arthur never did this, no, but he wanted this stranger to keep grinding his cock against Arthur’s ass, to keep swearing a stream of half-incoherent endearments against Arthur’s ear. _Please, don’t stop._

Arthur fastened on the little details as he fucked his fist right to the edge and over—

    The sweat-slick heat of being pressed so tightly against Eames’s chest.

    Eames kissing the back of his neck, making his skin tingle _all over._

    Eames’s voice—just his voice was enough, fuck.

    _Relax, darling, let me take care of you._

  
The wind chime stirred in the tree. Arthur felt a lovely sleep-weight stealing over his body, making him loath to get out of bed to clean himself up. Sometimes it was alright to be a mess, right? He trailed his fingers through the come streaking his stomach and shivered, thinking about how perfectly Eames had fit into his favorite scene. It was objectively such a boring fantasy, he knew. He just liked it, and he had found himself returning to it over the years in all its minor iterations. What did it say about Arthur that he wanted—but _whatever_ , he was way too sleepy to be psychoanalyzing himself. He rolled over and snuggled against his comforter. Closing his eyes again, he pictured Eames cuddling close against his back, entangling their legs together, breathing against his ear. With a pleasant, unfamiliar ease, he fell asleep.

 

Following Eames’s recommendation, Arthur took Bea to a functional doctor, who ordered more subtle tests to screen for autoimmune disorders and recommended an elimination diet to begin exploring Bea’s food allergies.

“But I’m not allergic to anything,” Bea said.

Dr. Fischer explained the difference between allergies and intolerances: that some foods that might not cause an anaphylactic, true allergic reaction could still be difficult for one’s body to digest and thus could still tax the immune system. “If you cut out all these foods—the usual suspects—for a month and then add them back in one at a time, we should be able to see which ones, if any, you’re reacting to. Taking them away for a while gives your body a rest, which usually makes people feel better—and because you’re taking a break from the food, when you reintroduce it, your body will have a more noticeable reaction that’ll give us good information. Make sense?”

Arthur thought it was worth a try, and Bea seemed cheerful about the prospect of such a concrete plan of action—well, until they left the appointment, and he realized how dramatic the food restrictions were.

“Does this mean no tacos?” he said glumly, rubbing his arm where the latest batch of blood had been drawn.

Arthur studied the packet of information on elimination diets and anti-inflammatory foods that Dr. Fischer had given them. “Tacos have—let’s see—corn and nightshades.”

“What about burritos?”

“Wheat flour tortillas are a no. And there are—ah—legumes and nightshades again.”

“Fuck.”

“Bea!”

“Sorry.”

Arthur smiled and looked up from the food list. “It’s okay. It’s understandable. But I think I have an idea.”

One stop at the fancy organic grocery store later, they were at their favorite sushi place, and Bea was dunking his salmon avocado rolls into a dish of coconut aminos that Arthur had brought into the restaurant in his backpack.

“It’s cool to carry your own condiments around anyway,” Arthur said.

“‘Guess so. But, like, hot sauce, not…whatever this is. Brown coconut juice? Argh, I can’t have hot sauce, can I?”

“How about making it the first thing you re-introduce in four weeks?” Arthur passed over the soy sauce on the table to try the coconut aminos; he should probably stick to the diet too, if Bea was going to be following it. “It doesn’t taste exactly like soy sauce, but it’s not bad,” he decided.

“Does this mean we can eat sushi all the time?”

Arthur thought about the extensive list of foods marked NO in the elimination diet packet. “Yeah. I think it does.”

“Cool,” Bea said around a mouthful of nigiri. “Sushi and feeling better. We can do this.”

 

The next Monday, Arthur and Bea went into the city for Bea’s hair appointment at the salon school where Ariadne was training, and Arthur found himself spending the afternoon wandering through SFMoMA. Arthur hadn’t been to SFMoMA since it had reopened. When he left Bea in Ari’s scissor-happy hands, he decided he might as well kill a few hours exploring the renovations and the photography exhibits. He had brought his laptop and even a book, but doing work from the lobby of the salon school suddenly seemed like a shabby way to spend the day.

“I could wait until you’re finished if you want to go,” he told Bea, hesitating, but Bea just exchanged a grimace with Ari and shook his curly head.

“Just go—treat yo’self,” Ari quipped, putting her hands on B’s shoulders. “That’s what B’s going to be doing here, right, my man? We’re going to hook him up with a fresh cut and some sick color.”

“Yeah, don’t work, Arthur. Go!” Bea echoed. Arthur had to smile at how his nephew looked like Ari’s shadow today: they were both far too stylish in dark jeans, heavy boots, and plaid shirts rolled up to the elbow—Ari’s revealing her intricate, blackwork floral sleeve, Bea’s the sharpie doodles he had intently drawn on the train. With the two of them set against him, how could he resist?

“I’ll be back in a few hours,” he said, an assurance met with B’s _whatever_ shrug. B was already busy looking around, taking in all the beautifully dressed salon students and the red-lipped receptionist with the pumpkin orange hair. “Text me if anything—”

“Yeah, yeah.” Ari leaned over to brush a kiss against his cheek. “We’ll text you. Have fun museum-ing.”

Dismissed, Arthur could only resettle his laptop satchel on his shoulder and take himself off, down Market Street, to the MoMA. He checked his bag in the lobby and took the elevator to the third floor to the Larry Sultan exhibit.

Arthur had seen most of the big color photographs before in other exhibits, so it was comforting to return to them. He took his time, shuffling between prints, peering closely as if they were paintings, stepping right up into the sacred space of each photograph, nose nearly to glass. There was this picture from ’88, “Reading in Bed,” Sultan’s parents in sync both listing to the left, faces mostly hidden by newspaper and magazine. A gulf of beige, synthetic fabric stretched between their wizened bodies. Arthur could feel the fluff and weave of the blanket with its satin border. He wanted so viscerally to curl up in that space between Larry Sultan’s parents. No, between his own parents. He wanted to be his mother curling up in that space in _her_ parents’ bed—a figment space, in both cases, a place that had existed in time so briefly that it had never been documented.

That morning, before the train ride and the salon school, Bea hadn’t been sure he was well enough to go. Despite B’s initial success adhering to the healing diet and the promise of a new treatment plan on the horizon, the reality was that it had been less than a week, and Bea was still sick. He and Arthur had sat on the couch for half an hour while B had weighed his aches and pains against his desire for fresh hair. Arthur had been quiet, making him green juice and then just sitting beside him, letting him look inward to feel his body and decide. Now, in the photography exhibit, Arthur let himself cry a little bit—just tear up, really—staring at Los Angeles lavender in early evening, a living room yellow like his grandmother’s house during Jeopardy hour, bougainvillea glowing in the fading light as if on fire. In the last room of the exhibit, an interview with Sultan played on loop. Photography was a big finger pointing, going _look at that,_ according to the dead photographer. He said, “There’s something quite blunt and wonderful about ‘look at that!’”

 _Look at that!_ Arthur thought a little while later when he returned to the museum’s first floor. He took the steps in twos toward the Richard Serra sculpture—blunt, wonderful, filling the airy room that had been constructed to house its massive, rusting curves. A beautiful woman in a gray sheath dress and loafers, a floral scarf wrapped around her head, came down the stairs past Arthur and approached the sculpture, her arm inching forward. Arthur knew she was going to touch it. She splayed her hand on the rusted iron and then turned, red lips parted in surprise, knowing she was watched.

Eventually, Arthur approached the sculpture too and wandered into its spiral-maze. The slanting red walls reminded him of a desert slot canyon. Hidden within the structure, he gave into the impulse to touch the rough metal. A sign had said that although the walls seemed strong, immovable, they were actually fragile. But beneath Arthur’s hesitant finger-tips, the metal felt strong with the kind of resilience things develop while weathering years and hardships. The sculpture had a weird effect on his heart, he thought, as he made his way into one of its spiral’s centers. He rubbed his chest, feeling the dig of buttons into his sternum where he pressed, a place where the tension and overwhelm had lived these past months.

Arthur turned to escape the restful little cul-de-sac before some other museum-goers could stumble upon his reverence, but he was too late—a man was already there, stepping tentatively out of the narrow passage into the labyrinth center. Arthur drew up in front of him. “Sorry,” he said. The man caught his eyes, and—oh! It couldn’t be. But it was the doctor, Bea’s handsome doctor. Eames.

“Arthur?”    

“Your glasses!” Arthur said. “I almost didn’t recognize you.”

Eames touched the tortoiseshell frames, slipping them a tad higher up the bridge of his nose. “What can I say, on my days off I have a Clark Kent thing going on.”

The reference was painfully fitting. Eames—Dr. Eames, Arthur corrected himself—was looking very off duty and very delectable in lovingly worn jeans and a baseball shirt with sleeves filled out by his sizable biceps. A bright red sweatshirt spilled out of the Bike to Work Day tote bag over his shoulder, and one of his Adidas trainers was untied. Arthur’s meandering gaze made it back to Eames face, and he realized Eames had been giving him a similar once-over. All of the sudden they were smiling at each other, and Arthur didn’t feel too self-conscious about his obvious interest—or about the fact that he had been wanking with Eames in mind all week, fuck.

“What happens if someone goes into cardiac arrest?” he tried to joke. “Do you find a phone booth and rip your clothes off before you start chest compressions?”

“Poor sod would probably be brain dead by the time I found a phone booth ‘round these parts,” Eames mused.

Arthur laughed. “Do you think this place, this sculpture, would do?”

Eames’s eyes lit up. “Oh, yes, absolutely. It’s lovely, and it feels private here, doesn’t it?” The effusion in his accented tones was delightful. He reached out toward one of the walls longingly, and Arthur laughed again.

“I touched it,” he confessed.

“You didn’t!”

“I did.”

Eames stepped close to him, leaned in; Arthur caught his breath. “Not so loud,” Eames whispered. “Don’t draw the museum police down on us.”

“What, the docents?”

“I just paid twenty five bloody dollars to get in here. If you get us thrown out with your rule-breaking ways, Arthur Jolet, it’ll be straight-up tragic.”

“I’ll restrain myself from further infractions,” Arthur promised. “But you should touch it. Look at it—it’s all _texture,”_ Arthur said of the rough, rusted surface with its dappled, burnt sienna hues. “It’s made to be touched, don’t you think? And if you don’t, won’t you be picturing it, thinking about it, wondering, for the rest of the day?”

“I would be, yes.” Eames swallowed, very serious, but he was looking at Arthur, not the sculpture. “I didn’t take you for an enabler,” he said, laying his hand on the curving metal wall and stroking it with splayed fingers, like petting a sleeping robot, an enormous, metal beast.

“Some sensations you just have to share.” Arthur thought of Sultan’s photographs and couldn’t resist asking, “Have you been upstairs yet? Did you see the Larry Sultan exhibit?”

“Not yet.”

“Oh, you have to!” He paused. “If you like photography, I mean.”

“You really like it,” Eames observed, letting his hand drop from the wall to pluck at the pocket of his jeans.

“Yes, and this exhibit’s wonderful—these big, color prints from two decades of Sultan photographing his parents in California in the eighties and nineties. The textures, the fabrics, the fake plants that fill their big suburban ranch house are, like, kind of repugnant but really comforting at the same time. They give me these weird home-not-Home feelings, you know? And then those pictures run into his Valley series of photographs, which are of porn shoots in, like, the same suburban ranch houses and neighborhoods, ten years later. He captures all these quiet moments of actresses in curlers hanging out on couches, actors naked surrounded by kitchen kitsch—you know, like ceramic cookie jars shaped like chickens.” He trailed off and shook his head. “It’s really strange.”

“Mm.” Eames was quiet, staring, and Arthur wondered if he had rambled on in a way that was off-putting. Perhaps he should try to extricate himself from the conversation, let Eames get on with his museuming in peace…

“So, ah, do you run into your patients outside of work often? Or, uh, your patients’ parents? I’m sorry if it’s—well, I can imagine it’s annoying, when you’re just trying to enjoy your time off.”

“Yes, please do apologize for being friendly and talking about art with me. Shocking imposition.” Eames fiddled with one of the strings from his hoodie, and it occurred to Arthur that he wasn’t holding a pen or something with which to fidget. “Don’t suppose I could convince you to press a full tour on me? I don’t want to make you retrace your steps, but I’d love to pick your brain about these photographs…or anything else you’d like to explore. I’m just wandering, you see.”

“Me too.” Arthur’s heart lurched. Was Eames asking him to—to, like, have an impromptu museum date with him? Or, like, a non-date, a friend date, whatever one ought to call a spontaneous hang out with one’s kid’s doctor? “I—uh—“ Arthur looked down at his watch. Fuck, it had been—two hours? He should probably check on Bea soon. _I should go,_ he thought, but instead he said, “Have you been outside to see the living wall yet?”

Eames grinned. “I have not. Lead the way.”

They traipsed back through the spiraling passage of the sculpture and climbed up the wide, polished wooden stairs that doubled as amphitheater seating. The woman in the lovely scarf was hunched over a sketchbook; she watched them carefully as they walked by, her artist’s gaze a salute to fellow rule-breakers. Despite Eames’s charge to lead the way, Arthur stepped around part of a tour group and managed to follow Eames up the stairs to the mezzanine shadowed by the living wall; Eames’s ass in those jeans was delightful, and Arthur let himself look.

The giant living wall was mostly rampant clover, glossy green leaves, and shaggy stalks of fern, but a small yellow flower peaked out of the verdant mass here and there. Arthur’s favorite thing about the wall was how the whole mass was alive with movement, city breezes off the Bay cutting paths through the vertical field, making the plants and grasses sway this way and that. Arthur explained this to Eames, who nodded, pointing out a quivering flower high up, toward the top of the wall. For several moments, they stood side by side—plenty of space between their elbows, but close enough that Arthur felt as hyper-aware of Eames’s small quiverings, the movement of his throat when he swallowed, the perpetual tapping and touching of his fingers against his pockets, his bag.

“So where’s your kiddo today?” Eames asked.

“Getting his hair done by our friend Ariadne. She and Bea expelled me from the salon school for the duration of it. It’s an extensive process. ”

Eames laughed. “I remember. My sister considered herself something of a cosmetological alchemist when we were kids, tried to do my hair pink once. Took ages to bleach it, leaning over the bathtub in my pants.”

Arthur’s lips twitched at the image. “Did it work?”

“Ah, by that you mean, do I have any pictures? The answer is no, I worked very hard to destroy every one.”

Arthur let himself smile. “But was it really pink?”

“Turned out more of an orange.” Eames sighed. “Not really my color, orange.”

Arthur squinted at him, trying to picture young Eames with brassy, orangesicle hair. “We went to the functional doctor,” he volunteered, apropos of nothing but the fact that the words had been buzzing around his head for the last twenty minutes. Part of Arthur really didn’t want to talk about it today with Eames, the part of him that just wanted to be a guy having a meet cute with his crush at an art museum on a beautiful day in the city. But he also wanted Eames to know that their meeting had _mattered_ , that things might be getting better for Bea—and for Arthur. He wanted Eames to know that he wasn’t just that strung out, nearly weepy mess he’d been in Eames office. “I think all your suggestions are going to really help Beatrice.”

“Oh, that’s wonderful, Arthur.”

They began to stroll back toward the mezzanine door. Ahead, at the heart of the third floor, was a busy coffee shop, its machines manned by a legion of artfully-tattooed baristas of indeterminate gender with fraying ball caps and dark nail polish. The shop looked like an outgrowth of one of the galleries it bordered, all white walls and diffuse lighting, the baked good descriptions presented on little, typed plaques.

“The Larry Sultan exhibit is through there,” Arthur said, gesturing past the cafe.

“Would you like to get some coffee?”

Arthur’s ears felt hot. “Sure. I might have to go soon though,” he said as they maneuvered to the back of the line. “To pick up Bea.” And damn, he loved his kid, but it came back in a rush to Arthur, why he hadn’t truly tried dating the past four years: it was awkward, having his attention drawn two ways at once, and of course, he felt insecure about how appealing he was as a packaged deal to other young guys. But yeah, that was standard for single parents, he’d have to get over it at some point—unless he wanted to wait until he was thirty-six to get out there, fuck.

Eames nodded like the time constraint was no big deal. He handed Arthur his bag so that he could pull on his hoodie, and then he jammed his hands into its pockets. His eyes were bright, interested. “So tell me about the functional doctor.”

“Well, they ordered a bunch of new, different tests,” Arthur said while they waited for their pour over and latte. “And started B on an elimination diet, which, you know, I have also been trying to follow.”

Eames grinned. “How’re you liking that?”

“Let’s just say, I am going to ruin this five dollar coffee with a horrible amount of sugar. I’m telling you now, so don’t judge me. Did you know that when you stop eating sugar for _days_ your body fucking craves it? Like, yesterday I was making a snack for Bea, and I found myself eating _spoonfuls_ of sunflower seed butter—” Eames was laughing at this point. “Seriously, it was the bottom of the jar, and I was scraping the last of it from the glass like an addict. Finally, I was like, what the fuck? I looked at the label, and it turns out there was the tiniest amount of sugar in the recipe that I had overlooked when I bought it. The tiniest amount. But my body _knew_ and went on autopilot to inhale this stuff _._ That’s how bad I’ve been jonesing.”

They sat down knee to knee at one of the shop’s tiny tables, and Eames continued to laugh through Arthur’s show of dumping several sugar packets atop the foam of his latte. “But other than that?”

“Good. It’s been good. Bea feels really optimistic about it, and that’s worth a lot.” Arthur couldn’t help but sigh and close his eyes to savor the sweetness of his first sip of coffee on his tongue. Eames’s knee twitched against Arthur’s, and when Arthur opened his eyes he saw Eames was tapping his foot and staring down into his own black coffee, face a little flushed. “Tell me about you,” Arthur said, not to change the subject from himself and Bea, honestly, but because Eames’s warm interest suddenly reminded him how little he knew about the doctor’s life. And if this was sort of a museum date—a museum date turned coffee date—well. “What do you do when you’re not working?”

“Aside from fondling sculptures and drinking coffee with strange men at museums?”

Arthur snorted. “Yeah.”

“I, ah, travel, and—and I read a fair amount. I’m trying to teach myself how to cook something besides instant noodles and toast.” Eames frowned. “To be honest, I just finished my residency year before last, so I’m still rediscovering hobbies and the miracle of free time.”

Arthur had a vague picture of what life in a hospital must be like, mostly garnered from nineties television. “Yeah, makes sense,” he said. “I feel that way with Bea. Not about him getting sick this year, though that’s been time consuming—but like, we’ve been together four years, and during the first two I was so overwhelmed with trying to set up a life for us, trying to figure out being a—a parent, I didn’t do anything for myself.”

“Mm. It wasn’t something you’d expected.”

Arthur hid a wry smile behind his coffee cup. “No, took us both by surprise.”

“I—ah, I had a long time to get used to the idea of medical school. It was something I’d been working towards since sixth form, but after a few stops and starts, I knew I wouldn’t really be through the whole process till I was thirty-two. The reality of it was so different from my expectations though. I mean, med school was alright, but the residency was ninety hours a week, one day off a month, in sickness and in health, that sort of thing.”

“Holy fuck, alright. I feel like a dick to have compared our shortages of free time. You win…or lose…on that front.”

Eames tapped his coffee cup against Arthur’s in a semblance of a cheers. “It was just me though. I didn’t have to take care of anyone else, so it was manageable.”

“And now?”

Eames smiled. “Still just me, yeah.” Arthur smiled back, a little flustered but glad he’d found a way to confirm that Eames was single. Eames continued, “What you’re describing—it’s a big deal, being responsible for a whole other human, a kid. I think it holds a candle to residency hours, sure. You’re never off the clock as a parent, especially a new parent. I at least got to go home at the end of my shifts and fall asleep into my Cup of Noodles.”

“Fair enough.”

“You and Bea seem—solid.” Eames gaze had gone soft, and he was poking at crystals from Arthur’s sugar packets where they’d scattered across the table. “However unexpected and difficult it was at the beginning, you seem to have a good thing going now.”

“We do alright.” Arthur said, pleased. “We always got along well, even when he was really little. Before my sister died.” Eames hadn’t asked, which showed more discretion than eight out of ten PTA parents and nine out of ten dudes he met while out at bars with Ari and Yusuf. At this point in the conversation, Arthur thought he might as well reward that reserve with candor. Honestly, though it wasn’t _always_ easier, it was _often_ easier for Arthur to just explain, just get the whole story out there, up front. “She had cervical cancer that spread before they could catch it. Missed a pap smear, and you know…”

“I’m sorry.”

“Thanks. Cancer fucking blows.”

“You were really young when she died?”

“Yeah. She died the day before my twenty-first birthday, actually.”

“Oh, wow.” Eames looked at him—and then _looked_ at him, clearly calculating.

“I’m twenty-nine,” Arthur said.

“I—”

“It’s okay. I’m a trained professional in listening to other people’s stories. I don’t mind fielding a few questions about myself now and then. Besides—” he dropped his eyes to his hands curled around his coffee cup “—I hear that’s what one does over coffee.”

“Now I feel like I should reciprocate.”

“What, you mean there’s more to your life story than a UCLA residency and a terrible instant noodles habit?”

“Shocking, I know.” He rubbed his stubble. “Would you believe that I’m not that interesting?”

Arthur snorted. “No.”

“Alright then, what would you want to know?”

“Mm. Is…um, you go by Eames, but it’s your—?”

“Surname, yes.”

Arthur had seen Eames’s full name on Bea’s referral paperwork, of course. “Is that, like, a prep school thing?”

Eames laughed. “More of a I-hate-my-first-name thing, though it started in school, yes. Ridiculous family name. Not me at all.”

“Names are important,” Arthur mused. “Bea has taught me that, actually.”

“He’s a smart kid. You’re lucky to have him.”

Arthur felt the truth of that flash through him, a sensation not unlike fear. “Yeah, I know. Why do you say you’re not that interesting?”

“I don’t know. Do you ever feel like—oh, like, a specialized tool?”

“A tool?” Arthur snorted.

Eames grinned sheepishly. “What I mean is, like, you get all about one thing in life. For me it’s other people, being—what did you call it? A trained professional in listening to other people’s stories? Well, and medicine, of course. Some days I feel like there’s this me who listens to people and practices medicine, and that’s it, nothing more to me, no _there_ there.”

This was a strange piece of information to know about one’s kid’s doctor, and a promisingly intimate piece of information to know about a hot, thick guy with lickable collarbones and an old Hollywood pack-a-day rumble of a voice that _did things_ to Arthur. He considered the confession gingerly, licking the last bit of sugar from the edge of his cup.

“Maybe you really have been on your own too long, then,” he said finally. “If you’re falling down solipsistic wells like that. Maybe you need someone—or, um, maybe you need people to mirror you, to show you yourself. What they see in you, all the ways you’re special.”

Eames sighed, twisted his cup in circles on the table, his lively, bedroom eyes downcast. “Yes, perhaps so.”

Arthur pushed his empty cup across the table so that it lined up with and touched Eames’s.

Eames cleared his throat and asked, “Do you want to look at the pictures with me?”

“I would, only—“ Arthur couldn’t ignore his watch, for all that it was painful to say no. “It’s been a few hours. I should probably head out to pick up Bea.”

“Right, of course. I—I’ll walk down with you.”

Arthur bussed their cups, Eames resettled his bag on his shoulder, and they surrendered the small table to an eager couple who assumed their knee-touching position and rapt stares as if they were understudies to Arthur and Eames’s coffee date, making Arthur self-conscious about the tete-a-tete he and Eames had just shared. He wasn’t sure what to say as they walked down to the lobby side by side. Should he ask Eames for his number? Would Eames ask him? They had talked over coffee, as if they were anybody, acquaintances from a party or a second Tinder date. And yet, they still had their professional relationship between them…

Stuck in these thoughts, Arthur missed his chance for further easy conversation. They were walking across the lobby, they were picking up his laptop bag from the coat check counter, they were standing in front of the museum doors. Arthur turned to Eames. “Alright, well, I guess I’ll see you next week.”

“Hm?”

“At the office. That’s when B’s next appointment is, next Thursday. I forgot you don’t keep the schedule, but of course you don’t.” Arthur smiled.

Eames hesitated, lips parted, a strange look passing across his pretty features like he was about to sneeze or say something particular. “Arthur,” he began. “I actually—”

“Excuse me.” A yoga pants-clad woman with a stroller was trying to pull open the door Arthur was leaning against.

“Oh, of course. I’m sorry.” Arthur moved to hold the door for her as Eames stepped out of her way.

The tow-headed toddler in the stroller looked up at Eames with big blue eyes, shrieked, and promptly hurled their plush elephant at him. Eames happened to be staring at Arthur, so the elephant caught him unawares—in the face. There was a clatter as his glasses fell and skittered across the polished lobby floor.

“Oh my God,” the mother said, hands flying to her mouth. “Tanner, no! I am _so_ sorry.”

“That’s alright.” Eames rubbed the bridge of his nose, a tad dazed. “You’ve got a little Cy Twombly there.”

“Who?” The woman raised her eyebrows. Below, the in the stroller, Tanner was staring at Eames with similar bewilderment.

“He means Cy Young,” Arthur said, scooping up the glasses and the elephant.

The mother intervened when Arthur moved to return the plushie to her kid, who stretched their arms out expectantly. “I’ll take that,” she said. Tanner shrieked again in protest. “I’m so sorry,” she said again. “I don’t know why he’s always like this when we actually go out somewhere.”

Arthur wiped Eames’s glasses with the corner of his plaid and, impulsively, put them back on Eames’s face with careful, slightly trembling fingers. “There you go,” he stammered, heart racing all of a sudden.

“Thank you, darling,” Eames murmured, and to the mom he said, “No harm done. Believe it or not, I have stuffed animals chucked at my head on a regular basis.”

“Do you two have kids then?” the woman asked, relaxing enough to hand the elephant back to Tanner.

“An eleven year old,” Arthur answered at the same time as Eames said, “I’m a family practice doctor.”

They looked at each other, and Arthur flushed as he realized what the woman had assumed and how his answer had sounded. Eames winked at him.

“Well, have a good rest of your day. Sorry again.”

“Enjoy the museum!” Arthur and Eames both waved goodbye to Tanner, who shook the elephant at them as he was rolled away.

“Well, that was silly,” Arthur said, still embarrassed.

They stared at each other; Arthur was half-trying to come up with something engaging to say, half marveling at the pleasure of the eye contact. Eames had speaking eyes, far moreso than anyone Arthur had ever met.

“Arthur—” Eames began again.

At that moment, Arthur’s phone began to ring, and he was confused about why it wasn’t just vibrating as he pulled it out of his pocket before he realized—Bea always texted instead of called if he could help it. “Oh, fuck, I must be horrendously late to pick up B. The salon school’s on Geary,” he explained to Eames, the words tumbling out. “I should probably—”

Eames shoved his hands into the pockets of his jeans. “Yeah, yeah, of course.”

“Are you—? Which way are you walking?”

Eames shifted, then sighed. “I was just heading in, actually, when you found me. The sculpture was my first stop.”

“Oh, right, you told me that, yeah. Well, uh.” The phone continued to jangle. “Have fun. Those photographs on the third floor—they’re very good. See you Thursday!” With a wave, he turned and half-sprinted outdoors to pick up B’s call.

“Bye!” Eames called after him. The doors whooshed shut behind Arthur, and he answered the call just before it went to voicemail.

“I’m sorry, B! I lost track of time. I’ll be there in—”

“Arthur! I’m not done yet,” Bea said. “Ari and I just wanted to ask you your opinion about color!”

Arthur tried to catch his breath. “Yeah? Okay. Whatcha thinking?”

“Well,” he gushed, “Ari has this _totally awesome_ dark blue, like a navy blue. But we could also keep the blonde, but like a white blonde with different colored highlights.”

Arthur turned around and squinted at the glass of the museum doors, trying to glimpse Eames, but the doctor had already disappeared from the lobby and into the museum proper. “And you want _my_ opinion?” he asked Bea. “Um. What if you do the different colors while you’ve already got the blonde thing going, and then get the blue next time?”

B sighed loudly. Arthur could hear Ari laughing in the background. “It’s so hard to choose!”

“I can’t wait to see.”

Arthur let Bea get back to his beautification. Bea probably had another hour, if Ari was just putting in the toner. Arthur thought about going back into the museum, taking the elevator to the Larry Sultan exhibit, trying to find Eames again. Wouldn’t it be wonderful to experience the images with Eames, to drift from photograph to photograph, discussing their favorites in animated whispers? Arthur thought—no, he was pretty sure—that Eames would be glad, that it wouldn’t be weird for Arthur to reappear. He could just feel it. So maybe the professional boundary between them wasn’t _that_ important, if Eames felt the same way Arthur did.

Arthur’s eyes, and his heart, yearned across the museum lobby toward the elevators, but he found himself turning away and walking up the street toward Market. Which was the sensible thing to do.

His heart thumped loudly, lit up with adrenaline from the decision he _almost_ made, while he felt a simultaneous weighty sense of disappointment. _It’s okay_ _,_ he told himself. _You talked to him for, like, an hour. You touched his face, and he called you_ _darling_ _._ Arthur grinned, shaking his head, the warmth of the memory chasing the pangs of disappointment away.

_And you’ll see him again on Thursday._

 

Thursday came quickly enough. The intervening days, Arthur was pulled into picking up the slack of a vacationing teammate, reviewing nearly twice as many mental health notes and clinical assessments as usual, and B seemed, if not objectively _better,_ then more cheerful. His loud complaints about the rigors of the elimination diet were more theatrical and childish (in a good way) than pained.

“We have an appointment with Dr. Eames,” Arthur told Ashleigh when they arrived at the office a good ten minutes early.

“No, you don’t.”

Arthur looked up from where he was scribbling B’s name on the sign in sheet, startled. “What? But you called to confirm the appointment yesterday. For ten thirty—”

“You have an appointment, but not with Dr. Eames. You’ll be seeing Dr. Browning today.”

Arthur frowned. “Is Dr. Eames—” He hesitated, unsure of how to appropriately frame the question. _Where is he?_

Ashleigh turned away from her computer screen and gave him a rueful smile, adjusting the collar of the cardigan she was wearing over her black and gray Jack Skellington scrubs. “He’s fine. He just doesn’t work here. He’s a locum tenens physician.”

“A what?”

“Locum tenens. Like a substitute. He moves around to different practices to fill in for doctors on leave or when offices are short-staffed. He was filling in for the first few weeks of Dr. Cobb’s time out while Dr. Browning was on vacation. He was nice, wasn’t he?”

Arthur swallowed. An image of Eames at the museum rose in his mind: Eames at the heart of the rusting maze sculpture, reaching out to touch its walls, looking over at Arthur, his gaze _longing_ in a way that seemed more complicated in retrospect than it had at the time. _Nice._ “Yeah. I—Bea liked him.”

Ashleigh nodded, eyes drifting back to her screen. “Dr. Browning is also very nice. Bea’ll like him too.”

Because that seemed to be that, Arthur turned and walked back to Bea, still thinking of Eames’s expression when Arthur had dared to step close and slide his glasses on his face. Arthur’s fingers had slipped over his stubble, the curve of his ear, brushed against his messy brown hair. And Eames had called him _darling_ so easily—the epithet had felt like Eames’s muscled arms pulling him close.

God, Arthur was a sap.

 _I’ll see you Thursday_ , he had said, and oh, perhaps _that_ was why Eames’s face had gone all weird, right before Arthur had practically run out of the museum on his phone.

God, Arthur was an idiot.   

“New doctor today,” he tried to say lightly as he dropped down into the seat next to B’s. “Dr. Eames was only filling in last month. He’s at a different office now.”

“Oh,” Bea said, looking up from his comic. “Bummer.” He searched Arthur’s face with a worried frown.

“I’m sorry. I know you liked him.”

“It’s alright.” B closed the comic, using his phone as a bulky bookmark between the pages, and reached out to put his hand on top of Arthur’s. “It’ll be alright.”

“Yeah, of course,” Arthur said through an unwelcome thickness in his throat. Where was _that_ coming from? “As long as it’s alright with you.”

Ashleigh was right: Dr. Browning was nice. He was _alright_. He didn’t mis-gender Bea, and it was clear he had read the chart thoroughly. He was not as positive as Dr. Cobb or as clever as Dr. Eames, but he was thorough and thoughtful, listening to Bea and Arthur’s report of the functional doctor visits and the elimination diet progress. He promised to review the sleep study data as soon as it was forwarded from the sleep lab.

That night, after dropping Bea off at the sleep lab with his pillow and his favorite American Girl doll, Arthur flopped down on the living room carpet amidst their latest boxes of _stuff_ to be donated. The dog jumped off the couch and padded over, nosing Arthur’s chin until Arthur began to pet her. He was upset, mad at himself; the anger a shadow of the self-loathing he had frequently experienced as a case worker, the self-loathing that would overtake him when a new piece of information came to light that he, an assessing clinician, had utterly missed—or when a reunification didn’t work out, when kids went back in care. _You missed your chance, you fucked up._

Except he had a feeling. Was it rogue optimism or something more occult? He couldn’t say, but somehow, somehow, he just _knew_ he would see Dr. Eames again.

 _But how do you know?_ intoned the critical voice in his head. Arthur had googled ‘locum tenens physician’ as soon as Bea had gone into meet Dr. Browning and had learned that they could travel anywhere and everywhere to work. _Maybe he’s in New York City now. Or Arkansas, Los Angeles, Alaska. Maybe he’s in the Ukraine, in Iceland, or in New Zealand…_

 _No, I can just_ feel _it,_ Arthur argued. _It’s not over. I’m going to see him again._


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry this chapter kicked my ass and took forever-and-a-day. On the upside, I wrote the first draft of this part and the final chapter as one big chunk (up until I realized a 16k chapter would make the story hell of lopsided…MATHS >.>), so the last chapter is very close to finished and will be posted soon. :)
> 
> ...yeah, I did originally think this piece would be 2 chapters, and now it's 4! My first time posting a story serially, lol.
> 
> Many, many thanks to CoffeeWithConsequences for the thoughtful, super encouraging beta feedback. <3

 

Arthur was standing outside the sleep lab at six-thirty sharp, fiddling with the cardboard sleeve of his latte, the hood of his sweatshirt hastily pulled up to keep some of the early morning foggy drizzle off of his carefully combed hair. Waking up early hadn’t been a problem. Embarrassingly, he had fallen asleep stretched out on the living room carpet the night before and had woken up at quarter to five when a car alarm went off on the street, causing Iggy to start barking at the front window. Arthur had taken it as a sign that he should go on a quick run with the noisy dog and then treat himself to coffee from his favorite coffee shop downtown before he picked Bea up. Despite the unusual night of sleep and the Eames thing, Arthur felt alright, he thought, as he sipped his coffee. He wondered how Bea had fared, in a strange bed, hooked up to sensors and wires.

After a couple minutes of waiting, Arthur considered knocking on the glass, but then the technician who had spirited Bea away to the sleep lab last night unlocked the doors and ushered Arthur inside with a cheerful hello. Arthur wiped his feet on the mat, tugged off his hood, and looked around the waiting room, which was still thick with shadows, the florescent lights turned off.

“Oh, is that for me?” The technician grinned down at Arthur’s coffee. “I’m just joking. End of my shift. Gonna be asleep in an hour or two.”

Arthur’s hand may have automatically tightened around the paper cup. Relaxing, he asked, “Is it hard to do overnights?”

She ran her hand through her short blonde hair and shrugged. “I like ‘em, but they’re not for everyone. I’ve always been a night owl. Come on, your little dude is just up and brushing his teeth, should be ready to go in just a moment.”

“He must still be zonked,” Arthur said, following her back into the lab proper. “He doesn’t usually wake up this early.”

“Eh, yeah. Believe me, we’ve seen worse.”

“So, how did he sleep? Can you tell me, or—?”

“The office’ll call you today to set up a time to come in, so you can talk to the doctor about the results.”

“Oh, okay.”

Bea emerged from one of the rooms, already wearing his backpack and clutching his American Girl doll, Felicity. He looked alert, but his hair was wild. Blonde curls streaked with purple, green, and pink pastels stuck up everywhere like a frizzy, rainbow cloud.

“Hey,” Arthur said, pulling Bea against his side for a hug. “How was it?”

“Cool.” Bea yawned. “Look.” He opened his phone and showed Arthur a selfie of him lying in the center of what looked like a huge hotel bed, wearing a cannula with wires taped to his forehead and chin. There were circular sensors attached to his chest above his collarbones, and a cluster of multi-colored, tiny wires twisted from behind his head down his back. “Don’t I look like a cyborg? They put _putty_ in my hair to keep the sensors there.”

“I had no idea they were going to do all that,” Arthur said, gaping at the picture. Holy fuck. Cyborg indeed. “Wow. Are you sure you managed to sleep?”

Bea shrugged. “Yeah, it wasn’t that bad. The putty though.”

Arthur looked at his twisted _yuck_ expression, then at his hair, and he realized there were still clumps of beige medical gel tangled into the roots all over Bea’s scalp. “Oh!”

The technician laughed. “It’ll wash out once you get home and take a shower.” She looked at Arthur and took pity on his confusion. “It’s so we can attach the sensors to the scalp,” she explained. “Without, you know, shaving off people’s hair.”

Bea groaned. “You promise it’ll wash out?”

“Cross my heart. You just might want to wash it a couple times…and scrub a bit.”

Bea turned from her and looked up at Arthur with wide eyes. “Seems like someone who’s had to spend the night inside the Matrix deserves a special diner breakfast before he goes home and has to spend thirty minutes washing putty out of his hair.”

“Bea,” Arthur said. “You know what we decided about the diner.”

Breakfast on Bea’s new diet was the most difficult meal of the day, no bones about it. Breakfast for Arthur had long been a simple affair; he ate toast, eggs, maybe some kind of smoothie. Bea, on the other hand, had inherited his mother’s taste buds. He was a nut for all those terrible-for-you classic breakfast foods: blueberry pancakes and waffles smothered in syrup, bacon and sausage, omelets bursting with gooey cheese. The kind of stuff Arthur had been more likely to eat drunk at Denny’s at four a.m. than _in the morning._ With the new, anti-inflammatory elimination diet, they had achieved a sort of detente where breakfast now consisted of things like berries and cups of bone broth, bacon and veggie stir fries. Bea and Arthur had been in the habit of getting diner breakfast a couple times a month, but when Bea had started the elimination diet, their diner was one of the restaurants Arthur had decided wasn’t worth the time or aggravation until B’s diet became less restrictive.

“Please,” Bea said.

“Begging is not a good look on you. What would you eat?”

“I could eat bacon! And sausage! And um, melon? In a fruit cup?”

“Someone next to us will order chicken and waffles, and you’ll be so sad, don’t even lie.”

“I won’t! _Please_ Arthur. Bacon! And I just want to _be_ in the diner, really. Don’t you miss it?”

Arthur sighed. “I don’t know if I can bear to be seen in public with a guy whose hair is full of putty. But as long as Felicity is there to keep it classy, I suppose I’ll manage. Okay.” He tousled Bea’s messy hair—and got medical gel on his fingers. Gross.

Bea grinned and swung Felicity around in a circle.

“You ready?” Arthur asked.

“Don’t forget your pillow, dude,” said an amused male voice, and another sleep technician stepped out of the room behind Bea, carefully spooled, colorful wires in one hand, Bea’s Captain America pillow in the other. Arthur was looking him over before he quite realized what he was doing. The tech was tall and wiry and had a large plaid shirt thrown on over his scrubs, headphones around his neck. _Pretty_ , Arthur thought, taking in his cat-like brown eyes and high cheekbones, his dark hair tucked behind his ears and his silver hoop earrings. The tech looked at Arthur and smiled, then smiled wider. “Hello.”

“Oh, dang, thanks,” Bea exclaimed, before Arthur could reply. Bea grabbed the pillow. “Can’t sleep without Cap.”

The dude tech laughed. “You’re a man of taste, Mr. B.”

“Don’t lie, Seth,” said the other tech, thwapping him in the arm, “You’re way more into Tony Stark.”

“Um, yeah, who isn’t?”

Both techs laughed now, and Bea giggled with them.

“Don’t mind us,” the blonde one said around hiccoughs of giggling. “After, like, six in the morning on the night shift, everything becomes _hilarious_.”

“I dunno,” Bea told Arthur. “They were like this last night too.”

Arthur smiled. He had been worried about Bea spending the night at a medical facility without him, and it was a relief that, hair-related inconveniences aside, the experience hadn’t been uncomfortable or without levity.

Bea waved goodbye to the blonde technician, and Seth walked them to the door. “Happy diner times,” he said to Bea, holding the door. “Take care.”

“Thanks again,” Arthur told him. “And, uh, goodnight.”

Seth winked at him, and Arthur felt a fizzy burst of attraction in his chest, lightening his smile. When the door clunked shut behind them, the feeling dissipated as suddenly as it had bloomed, leaving him feeling empty and thinking of his disappointment the day before. As they walked to the car, Arthur thought about Eames—lovely, competent, laughing Eames; awkward, lonely, fond Eames, who had vanished from Arthur’s world maybe forever—and he sighed. The buzz from his run and his coffee seemed to have disappeared along with the momentary high of being noticed by the cute technician, and now Arthur wanted nothing so much as the opportunity to crawl into his bed and knock out for the next six hours.

 _Not an option,_ he told himself. There was Bea, struggling to clip in his seat belt with his pillow, doll, and backpack all heaped on his lap. Bea, already kicking his red Chucks up onto the dash and reaching to switch the radio from news to college radio pop. Arthur pushed his angst down into a manageable weight in his stomach and gave Bea a smile. “Diner time?”

“Diner time!” Bea whooped.

At the diner, Arthur and Bea were able to snag their favorite seats around the U-shaped counter. There was an empty chair next to them for the moment, so Arthur propped Felicity up there on top of Bea’s backpack. They played hang man on their paper placemats with the crayons that lived by the register for little kids’ drawings while they waited for their bacon and fruit bowls.

“So, how you feeling?” Arthur finally asked the dreaded question, after the bacon had been devoured.

Bea shrugged. “Tired, kinda achy. But not that bad. Am I going to school today?”

“Mm. See how you feel after you get that gunk out of your hair. If you want a nap or whatever, I can always drive you in after lunch.” Arthur tried not to think about how at this rate they were going to get in trouble with the school district. “I can call Ms. K and let her know.”

“Okay.” Bea colored a cluster of hearts on his placemat with a blue crayon. “Thanks, Arthur.”

“Bring some of your gluten free bread next time, eh?” the owner said, leaning on the counter in front of them while he poured Arthur more coffee. “And I’ll use it to make you a breakfast sandwich.”

“Really?”

“Yes, really. ‘Gotta eat more than that.” He gestured to B’s picked over fruit bowl. “You’re a growing boy.”

“Thanks, Mr. Kim,” Bea enthused.

Arthur echoed his thanks, but Mr. Kim waved their gratitude away as a matter of course, just repeating, “You gotta eat more than that,” as he moved on to the next customer. Bea raised his eyebrows at Arthur, like, _see, we can totally still eat at the diner!_

“Yeah, yeah,” Arthur answered aloud, smiling into his coffee. Sometimes he was convinced that he and Bea were a lot alike, but whenever Bea struck up a conversation with a stranger, whenever he effortlessly charmed their neighbors, Arthur could only shake his head and marvel.

 

Later that day, the sleep lab receptionist called Arthur, and they set up an appointment for the following afternoon. Arthur picked Bea up from school at the beginning of sixth period—the doctor’s note that let him skip PE and the nightmare of the locker rooms predated his illness—and they drove back to the sleep lab to meet with the doctor there. The overnight technicians and their laid back, chatty world had vanished, replaced by a sedate waiting room in beiges and blues, health magazines fanned out on a low table and a Keurig coffee-maker looming by the reception window. Arthur, suitably caffeinated by this time of day, just stared at the machine, trying to decide whether it was out of place or in its most natural environment.

The sleep specialist, Dr. Morrow, was a bespectacled woman whose office decor suggested she enjoyed golf and, perhaps, marine wildlife. There was a paperweight shaped like an otter on top of some of the files spread across her desk, and an enlarged photograph set to the side that looked like it might be of a group of people whale watching. The doctor dispensed with the formality of meeting with Bea first and had both Bea and Arthur shown in, gesturing for them to take seats in the upholstered chairs in front of her desk. After so many exam room consultations, surrounded by particle-board cupboards, drug company-sponsored anatomy posters, and brochures of STI facts, it was strange to be meeting with a doctor in such an environment. Dr. Morrow looked more like the dean of something than a busy doctor.

“So, Beatrice,” she said, placing her hands on her desk and studying B over her glasses in a way that did nothing to dispel that impression. Out of the corner of his eye, Arthur saw Bea sit up straighter in his chair. “You made it through the sleep test…”

Bea nodded. “It wasn’t that bad. The technicians were really nice.”

“They’re a riot, aren’t they?” she said, turning to pull something up on her computer screen.

The ice broken—or thawing, at least—Arthur and Bea both slumped a little in their chairs.

“Let’s see your results, hm?” She gestured for them to look more closely, and they both pulled their chairs forward until they could see her screen. “Look at this.” She directed their attention to a page of graphs and numbers, particularly to a sort of bar graph filled with blue lines of varying thicknesses titled _PAT Respiratory Events_.

“What are we looking at?” Arthur asked.

“Those blue lines represent times during the night when your airway, Beatrice, became obstructed by the soft tissue in your throat and you stopped breathing, causing your brain to wake you up.”

“Wake me up? But I didn’t wake up more than once.” Bea stared at the chart, looking lost. “I mean, I only remember waking up once.”

“Mm. They’re micro-wake ups. Most of them you don’t notice. What happens is you can’t breathe, your oxygen level drops, and your brain tells your body _wake up_. You take a big breath of air, and then you immediately fall back asleep.”

Arthur shifted in his chair. “So, he has sleep apnea?”

“Technically an _apnea_ is a period of ten or more seconds when a person stops breathing. If you look here, you’ll see that only a fraction of Beatrice’s events lasted ten seconds or longer. On paper, he only has the most mild sleep apnea, what we call upper airway resistance syndrome. However, ten seconds is just a cut off point. Your sleep can be disrupted if you can’t breathe for five seconds, or eight, and your body has to wake you up to get oxygen. And Beatrice is waking up many, many times during the night. On the night we did the study,” she said to him, “You woke up twenty-five times per hour.”

“Woah,” Bea said.

“Yeah, woah,” Arthur echoed, because he had to say something, and _holy fuck_ was the only other exclamation that leapt to mind.

“We know good sleep is essential to health. It’s entirely likely that these sleep disruptions are contributing to the symptoms you’re experiencing.” She looked down at his chart. “Waking up feeling exhausted, fatigue throughout the day, muscle aches, difficulty concentrating…” She squinted at the paper, then raised her eyebrows. “Oh! You saw Eames.”

Arthur started. “What? Ah. You know him?”

She made an amused sound, her mouth twisting into a half-smile. “Oh yes. My wife was an attending at the hospital where he did his residency. He was one of our favorites. Very bright.”

Bea drummed his heels against the legs of his chair. “We liked him. He helped me figure out that I should come here and do the sleep test. But he’s, like, a loco tennis doctor—”

Arthur tried to turn his startled laugh into a cough. “Locum tenens, B.”

“Yeah, that.” Bea waved a hand. “So I only saw him once. Arthur says he’s probably in New Zealand now.”

This time Arthur tried to turn his surprised cough—he might have choked a bit on his own saliva—into a laugh. “That was just an example,” he said. “I don’t really…”

“Well,” Dr. Morrow said, looking between them, her hand still resting atop Eames’s notes in a way Arthur thought seemed fond. “Perhaps you’ll see him again. He never stays away for long.”

 _Why is that?_ Arthur wondered, greedy. But of course he couldn’t ask. _Bea has sleep apnea,_ he told himself. _You are having a conversation about sleep apnea._ “So, uh, what were you saying about Bea’s symptoms being connected to these micro-wake ups?”

She folded her hands on top of Bea’s chart. “I was saying that for most people, it’s hard to pinpoint when the apnea or upper airway resistance began, but the effects on the body are cumulative. As you can imagine,” she continued, a hint of exasperation creeping into her tone, “there’s a dearth of research on the effect of sleep deprivation on the incidence of autoimmune disorders, but we do know it has a negative impact on the immune system in general.”

“Okay, yeah, that makes sense,” Arthur said. The racing of his heart slowed somewhat as he turned his thoughts away from Eames and to the facts the doctor was presenting. “Wow. Okay. So, do you know why this obstruction is occurring?”

“The cause can be genetic. Some people have larger tongues, more soft tissue in their throat. Beatrice, your jaw and palate are very narrow.”

Bea nodded at her, then frowned, considering.

Arthur stared at his nephew. His jaw seemed…not abnormal, but he had a slender face, sure. “So how can we treat it?” he asked. “Is there…a surgery?”

She shook her head. “Not one I would advise. If it were a matter of removing your tonsils, Beatrice…but since the main factor is the shape of your jaw, we would have to break your jaw in several places to reshape it, then wire it shut for three months.” She raised her eyebrows at them. “Yeah. Not pleasant.”

At the words _break your jaw in several places,_ Arthur had whipped his head around to gape at Dr. Morrow. “So, then what?”

“There are a few options. Usually we recommend a CPAP machine. It’s a machine that’s hooked to a mask that you wear over your mouth and nose,” she explained, “and it creates a steady stream of air that keeps your airway open while you sleep. We don’t necessarily recommend CPAP machines for children or adolescents though, because they can alter face shape. I think Beatrice might be a better candidate for an oral appliance, a retainer like this.” She picked up a model of a set of teeth and gums, a light pink hard plastic retainer fitted over both the top and bottom molars. She handed the model to Beatrice, who took it gingerly and turned it over in his hands, looking intrigued but still a little lost.

“It’s like what you wear after braces?” B asked uncertainly.

“Kind of. The top and bottom part of the retainer hook together in a way that pulls your bottom jaw forward, opening up your airway while you sleep.”

“Is it uncomfortable?” Bea unhooked the two parts of the retainer on the model and made the teeth clack together like a wind up Halloween toy. The noise was apparently louder than he had anticipated, and he dropped the model in his lap with a wince. “Sorry.”

Dr. Morrow leaned back in her chair and smiled, shaking her head slightly as if to communicate unconcern. “Some people find it uncomfortable at first, but you get used to it.” Bea held out the model to her, and she took it and placed it back on her desk next to the otter paperweight. “I use one myself.”

“Oh.”   

“What do you think, B?” Arthur asked. His head was still buzzing with a sort of exhilaration that should have been at odds with B receiving a diagnosis for a chronic condition that was going to dog him his whole life. Rationally, he knew he should feel the weight of the diagnosis—and the he _would_ _,_ before long. In this moment, however, he felt unmoored by a sense of relief that made him want to gush gratitude at this stately sleep doctor. To hug the sleep technicians, the blonde tech and handsome Seth—Ashleigh the receptionist, boring Dr. Browning, and Dr. Fischer—and Dr. Eames, lovely Dr. Eames, wherever in the world he was. Because _holy fuck,_ they had _an answer._ Maybe not the whole answer, maybe sleep apnea wasn’t the entire puzzle, but it seemed like it could be a huge, important piece.

Bea was gripping the armrests of his chair and bouncing a little in his seat, like he was torn between the need to hear Dr. Morrow out and to get up and run laps around the building. He probably felt the same conflicted elation.

“Let’s try it,” he said, looking between Arthur and Dr. Morrow with a trembling, determined smile. “What’s the next step?”

 

The next step was an appointment with an affiliated dentist who could fit Bea for a sleep apnea retainer. After that, other steps fell into line: appointment after appointment, week after week, the conditions of Bea’s recovery were put in place. He took home his special retainer, and he continued to work with Dr. Fischer to transition from the elimination diet to a more expansive diet, re-introducing new foods one by one. Arthur researched a community acupuncture clinic on the other side of the lake and, overcoming his personal aversion to the idea, took Bea to weekly appointments there.

(“It’s actually nice,” was Bea’s verdict after the first hour, as he climbed back into the car. “The needles don’t hurt, and once they stick you with ‘em, you just lay there and take a nap. Like a sleepy pincushion.” Arthur shuddered.)

The progress was incremental and still, Arthur thought, driven by the sense of optimism they shared. Dr. Fischer reminded them that it had taken a long time for Bea to get sick, for his body’s systems to wear down, and it would also take time for those systems to heal. Arthur repeated this idea like a mantra on the days when Bea overexerted himself and crashed hard, when he had to be picked up, grim and tearful, from school. But time went by, summer and the end of the school year crept closer, and overall, Bea was healthier, stronger. He shivered and sweated less, and he reported that his head felt clearer, less muzzy. On Saturdays, he and Arthur walked Iggy to the farmers market on the other side of the lake and bought deep green lacinato kale, baskets of blueberries, bright sunflowers and dark red dahlias wrapped up in sheets of newspaper. Sometimes they took the N Judah out to the beach and spent hours lounging, reading comics, snacking, and watching surfers brave the undertow. Walking back to the train, they would point out their favorite houses and apartment buildings, the ones with the pretty pastel stucco and the succulent gardens, the ones where they’d want to live. It was a pretty good life.

Arthur slept more soundly, and he went running more often. _Take care of yourself, darling—_ the admonition would flutter, unbidden, into his mind, sometimes making him smile, sometimes making him sigh. Arthur couldn’t shake the Eames-related glumness that surfaced in his thoughts throughout the day—or, as often as not, at night. His treacherous mind and body had latched onto the doctor’s image. Arthur had tried to let go. (Well, he hadn’t gone on any dates or anything, but he had _thought_ about it, and that counted for something, right?) It was just that he didn’t meet people he liked the way he’d liked Eames. Try as he might to move on, Arthur couldn’t help stroking himself to climax picturing the handsome doctor. Sometimes in the exam room where they had met, sometimes in the heart of the labyrinthine sculpture where he had glimpsed the doctor’s vulnerability. Often, he pictured Eames in his room, his bed, curled around him, listening to the swaying chime in the magnolia tree. Or—less sexy, but still, a habit—Arthur found himself drifting off to imagined scenes of Eames across the country, sometimes the world, working with patients, exploring, reading. Arthur wondered if Eames had taken his advice, had found someone with whom to share his travels—a sounding board, a companion in his moods and interests, someone who made him feel less alone. But thinking about _that_ too much made Arthur’s heart ache. He knew that when he started to stray too far in that line of thinking, it was time to bury himself under his comforter and try to sleep.

 

Bea was doing well enough that Arthur felt okay leaving him with Yusuf for the weekend while he attended a brainstorming and bonding retreat with his QA work team up the coast. The retreat conveniently overlapped with a weekend-long art camp, a series of workshops for young artists, that B wanted to attend at the San Francisco Art Institute in the city. Yusuf had promised that he, Bea, and Ari would go out to their favorite SF sushi restaurant Saturday night, and Bea was so excited about the prospect of the mini-vacation that he had already packed and re-packed his overnight bag three times.

This enthusiasm eventually motivated Arthur. On Thursday, he dug his luggage out from under his bed and unearthed box after box, looking for a particular thick wool sweater that he remembered folding away in a package of cedar and camphor. Bea wandered in through the maze of suitcases and plastic storage bins and saw the box of photography gear, one of its cardboard flaps sagging open.

“What’s this?” He touched the box with the toe of his bright green Chucks.

“That box? Just some of my dad’s—your grandfather’s—old photography gear. Yeah, go ahead, you can look at it,” he said, as Bea dropped to his knees and began to peel back the corners of the cardboard box carefully. “It’s probably really dusty. I haven’t looked at it in ages.”

“Woah,” Bea enthused, blinking down at the nested black equipment—lenses in worn cases, a negative box and a loop, the scuffed gray cover of a Polaroid Automatic 100 Land Camera, a couple Minolta camera bodies and a Canon SLR wrapped in a silk scarf that Arthur recognized as his stepmother’s. There were even a few yellow boxes of expired Kodak film. Arthur, leaning over Bea, picked one up, smoothing his thumb over the 1990s design and typeface. Bea’s hands hovered over the box as if its contents were treasures he was hesitant to plunder, instead of obsolete junk one could pick up for a few bucks at a garage sale. He shouldn’t be so flippant, Arthur thought, picking up and unsheathing one of the telescoping lenses. Some of the lenses had been high end equipment in their day, and they were probably still worth something. His dad’s professional camera equipment had been sold, of course; the remnants were just toys, really, toys and oddities. Basic beginner equipment. Arthur put the lens down, unwrapped the intact 35mm camera, and handed it to Bea. “Here, take a look.”

“Wow,” B said again, turning the camera in his hands. “How old is this?”

“Mm. Forty-some, fifty years?”

“Dang. Does it—it doesn’t still work, does it?” He was holding the camera in his hands like it was a relic—which it was, after all, but—

“Oh, it probably works just as well now as it did in the seventies. Might need to be cleaned, but this stuff is all analog. Look through here.” Arthur indicated the viewfinder, and that B should take the lens cap off. “And here, twist the lens like this—this one’s a zoom lens. S’not as good as the standard lens, but it’s fun.”

 _“Oh.”_ Bea pointed the camera around the room, fingers fiddling with the zoom lens.

“Do you see anything when you hover your finger over the button?”

“Which button?”

“That one—”

“No.”

“Oh, well. It probably needs a new battery. A little pressure on the shutter should light up the light meter, so you know if there’s enough light to take a picture. You gotta adjust the, um, speed and light—the uh, aperture and speed—to match.” He shook his head at himself, at his fumbling, with a small smile. “I actually don’t know a ton about cameras, but my dad tried to teach me a few times.”

Arthur pulled up the negative box and wriggled the leather-bound album from the bottom of the box, took a breath, flipped it open on his lap. Every time he held this album, he was conflicted about its fate. It should really be on a shelf, on the coffee table, but that would be so _raw_. Even now, flipping through it felt like a succession of blows—a punch, a caress, a punch.

Bea was adjusting the lens, pointing the camera at Arthur. Maybe his finger slipped, because as the shutter clicked, he whipped the camera away from his face and looked between it and Arthur with an expression that was half chagrin, half excitement. “Did I take a picture?”

Arthur laughed. “I doubt there’s film in there.”

“Oh.”

“Can I see?”

Bea handed the Canon over, and Arthur released the back of the camera body. “See, this is where you load the film.”

“I wish there was film in it,” B said. “You looked so good. The look on your face…”

Arthur studied Bea for a minute, closing the camera and tightening his fingers around its textured metal and plastic, its buttons and stiff nylon strap. “My dad and I always called those ghost pictures,” he said, “All the pictures you take when you forget to put film in the camera—or when the film gets messed up and the pictures don’t develop. I took a lot of them when I was little. Some of them I can still see perfectly if I think about them. I framed them, thought about them so intently, that when I pressed the button, they were, like, seared onto my brain.” Arthur swallowed, handed the camera back to Bea. “Would you like to—I mean, if you want, we can get that cleaned and buy some film for it. You could try taking some pictures.”

Bea nodded. His eyes were wide. “Are you sure? I don’t want to break it, if it belonged to your dad.” But his fingers were already curled around the camera possessively.

“‘Course I’m sure. Even if you did break it while using it, that’d be a million times better than it sitting under my bed in a box. My dad would be—” Arthur felt himself starting to get choked up and swallowed, pushed through it. “—Would be really thrilled that you wanted to use it. I mean, hell, that you want to take pictures at all. It wouldn’t have to be with this old stuff. You could use my digital SLR.”

Bea shook his head. “No, I want to try it with film. It’s different, isn’t it?”

“I think so. The processes are pretty magical.”

His eyes dropping to the album on Arthur’s lap, Bea scooted forward. “What’s in there?”

Arthur repositioned the book so that they could flip through the pages together. “It’s a bunch of my dad’s prints. We put it together for one of those parent show and tell days at school, so I could show my class what he did for a job. I think it convinced a few of them that he was real.”

“What?”

Arthur snorted, shook his head. “He was away a lot working. There was…a little bit more stigma around having a single parent when I was a kid. I think I was in third grade at the time.”

“Oh.”

Arthur’s dad had made eight by ten prints of 35mm negatives—along with a few prints directly from large format negatives—which fit neatly in the plastic sleeves of the album. They looked at some macro shots of dandelion fluff and dragonfly wings, and at a field of dappled gray that was labeled “brazier ashes from the memorial at Hiroshima.” There was a portrait of eight year old Arthur standing on top of a skateboard, staring blank-faced at the camera. Frenetic action shots of UC Berkeley student protests followed by a series of two women with sunburnt faces and long cotton skirts, sisters, slaughtering roosters and dunking them in a pot of boiling water to remove their feathers. A series of apartment interiors, portraits of families drinking coffee, smoking cigarettes; if you looked closely, you could see bullet holes spotting the walls, could see a tired resilience in the eyes of the people sitting for the camera.

“Gross,” B said, grabbing the album to peer more closely at the rooster photographs. He looked up at Arthur. “I thought your father was a war photographer.”

“He was. Those are pictures from Bosnia. No, not the rooster ones—I think those women were homesteaders he knew up the coast in Mendocino. The shots of the families drinking coffee. He didn’t think it was appropriate to show small children the kinds of photographs he was sent there to take, the ones he sent back to the newspaper, like of fighting and casualties and stuff.”

“But he thought it was okay to show kids pictures of animals getting slaughtered?”

Arthur’s mouth twisted into a half smile, wry but fond. “He was a strange man. The war gave him an odd perspective.”

“Did he—I mean, you saw him during the war?”

"Yeah. He went back and forth a lot over, like, four years. Couldn’t stay away. Most of my memories of him are from that time though.” Arthur ran his fingers over the particular portrait to which Bea had returned, a family mid-conversation, gathered around the table in a kitchen. A salt-and-pepper haired man slouched with one hand on a tall woman’s shoulder; she ashed her cigarette and looked toward a beautiful slip of a young woman hiding a smile behind a coffee cup. Two lanky kids leaned over a book, one of them holding a round-faced toddler who gaped at the camera. Arthur touched their faces. He had looked at this photograph many, many times.

“These were the people he would live with when he was in Sarajevo,” he said. “Emin and Lucija Pačariz, their cousin, their children. Sometimes my stepmother would joke and call them his ‘other family,’ and God, I hated them.” He made a small pained sound. “They sent me New Years cards for years. Now Lucija sends emails. I always meant to take a trip to Eastern Europe and visit them someday. I have—we have—an open invitation.”  

The warmth in his voice seemed to catch Bea off guard. Bea leaned into Arthur, ducking his head against Arthur’s shoulder and squeezing his arm. “Could we go? When I feel better?”

Arthur wrapped an arm around him and hugged him. “If you want to, yeah. I’d like that.”

A moment later, Bea cleared his throat. “Can I ask…how did he die?”

“Oh. Uh, he was shot in Sarajevo toward the end of the siege, crossing this street they called the sniper’s alley. Random. A lot of people died that way.”  

Bea looked up at him, frowning, as if Arthur had begun speaking a different language. Arthur wasn’t sure what his mom had told B, but he and B hadn’t talked about his dad like this before, about Bosnia. Bea sure as hell hadn’t learned about it in school, and he wouldn’t—a few paragraphs in a history textbook in high school, maybe more if he landed in an AP class. Arthur braced himself for more questions. Instead, Bea asked, tentatively, “Did he take any pictures of my mom?”

A measure of tension left Arthur’s shoulders, to be replaced by a different stab of grief. He tried to make his tone light. “Pfff. His first child? He only took like a billion pictures of her.” He hugged B more tightly and then let him go. “You want to see? C’mon, let’s find the box with the slide projector…”

So that afternoon, Bea fell asleep on the couch to the whir and click of the slide projector, watching images of his mother’s first cake and first smiles, first steps and first puppy kisses, glow and flicker on the sheet they had tacked up across the living room wall. Funny to think that this curly haired, impish girl in his father’s pictures had preceded the bossy teenager Arthur remembered—the young woman who used to shut herself in her bedroom with the phone when she was supposed to be babysitting, who used to dress Arthur in her clothing and fancy barrettes like he was her own scowling American Girl doll.

He went through the slides a second time while Bea snored softly next to him, stretched out so his feet rested in Arthur’s lap.

 

Thursday night, he dropped Bea off at Yusuf’s apartment in the city, his _My Little Pony_ backpack stuffed with what he’d need for his weekend art camp. Arthur had been able to call and get him last-minute switched from the drawing and painting workshop to the printmaking and photography one.

The drive up the coast was winding and beautiful, and Arthur took it slow, letting the swell of fog and drizzle envelope him. Early the next morning, before his team’s first meeting, Arthur was by the sea, in the wilderness, _breathing._ Breathing and thinking only a little bit about the particular blue-green of Eames’s eyes that he found reflected in a corner of a tide pool, a shadow falling across foliage, a scrap of lichen on a rock poised between woods and beach sand.

Three hours later, he was in his mother’s kitchen, having an argument.

Yusuf had called him as soon as he’d stepped back into cell phone range to tell him that Bea had gotten sick at his camp. “Sorry, mate, they wouldn’t let me pick him up,” Yusuf had said. “I’m not family, and I’m not on the list. He’s at his grandmother’s.”

“Fuck, that was stupid of me.” Arthur tossed his clothes back into his suitcase and resisted the urge to smack himself upside the head. _Stupid, stupid._ “Next time I’ll put you on that list.”

Arthur had intended to grab Bea and leave quickly, but as soon as he’d shown up, he could tell that his mother had a bone to pick with him. Nothing new there. A couple years ago, it might have taken him twenty minutes of escalating argument before he asked Bea to wait in the car; this time, he took one look at his mother and asked B to go outside straight away.

Now they were all but yelling at each other.

“Arthur, she’s—”

“He, mom. Beatrice is a _he_.”

His mother was pacing in the kitchen. She threw her hands up in the air. “Beatrice is not well, Arthur. You have to do something.”

Arthur stared at her. “What? I _am_ doing something. We’ve been going to doctor appointments every week, getting different tests done. He’s getting better, actually.”

“Arthur.” She gave him that look, like she was disappointed in him, waiting for him to figure something out—a hard math problem, for instance—bringing back so vividly those scenes at the kitchen counter when he was a little boy, after his father died and he had been taken from his stepmother. Arthur hated to think of his mother looking that way at Bea.

“Those drugs she’s on,” she said. “You know—you must know—that they can’t be good for him.”

“They’re not, like, _drugs_ , mom. We’ve been over his before. Puberty blockers have been used for over thirty years to delay precocious puberty. All they’re doing is putting a pause on his endogenous puberty, so he doesn’t go through the wrong puberty—which would be devastating, probably worse than all this shit we’ve been dealing with.”

 _“_ Pausing puberty, Arthur—it’s not _natural.”_

Arthur sighed. Of course. He pinched the bridge of his nose where his glasses used to sit before LASIK fixed the need for that tic. Jesus, being back in this house, having this kind of conversation with his mom, really cast him back into the long nightmare of adolescence. “Mother. I’m sorry, but you don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Oh, and you do?”

Arthur tried to speak slowly. “I have read the articles. The research. We are in consultation with a medical professional—actually, with a whole team of medical professionals who specialize in working with transgender kids. So, yes, I’d say so.”

“Wake up, Arthur! This is her life, her health, we’re talking about. It’s more important than some—than some phase or Internet fad. Can’t you put two and two together? You start Bea on this stuff, and then, lo and behold, she gets sick.”

“He!” Arthur nearly shouted. “He! Use the right pronoun. You have to try—to _at least_ try. You don’t get to argue this with me—it’s the way things are now, mom. Even the godforsaken DSM gets it. You don’t get a pass for being old.” He made angry air quotes around the word. “You don’t get a pass for having been a Berkeley hippie back in the day. And, for your information, his health problems are related to obstructive sleep apnea caused by his facial bone structure, not by his gender-affirmative care.”

His mother had stepped back from him and was crossing her arms across her chest, lips pursed, flat, holier-than-thou expression on her face, like _he_ was the one out of line. Maybe he was. It had been a long time since he’d yelled at her, since they’d yelled at each other. Arthur had spent his college years learning a different way to communicate, had spent his twenties practicing nonviolent communication and biting his lip around his mother. Even when he had taken Bea, they had hashed out the arrangement with Arthur wooden-faced, stating in a carefully calm, controlled voice what was going to happen, how it was going to be, again and again, until his mom gave in, washed her hands of them both in a shaking voice, feelings clearly hurt. She said if it had come to her own son threatening to call child protective services on her, then fine, she would always love him of course, but maybe they needed to take some space from each other. Arthur let her frame herself as the victim in the situation; the important thing was that she wasn’t victimizing Beatrice anymore. He took the offered _space_ with hungry hands and had held onto it in the intervening years, knowing it was the best thing for Bea.  

“This is _not_ the issue we’re discussing, Arthur,” his mother said.

“We’re not having this discussion anymore,” Arthur countered. “You said your piece. I appreciate that you are concerned for Bea’s health, and I am happy to tell you that he is under the care of competent doctors. I am his legal guardian and the only person with the rights to make his medical decisions. And we are leaving now.” He exhaled, took control of his voice as best as he could. “Thank you for picking him up from his camp. I really do appreciate that. We could—maybe try to all have dinner sometime soon. If you’d like.”

His mother nodded, not meeting his eyes. She was looking off to the side, eyes obviously filling with tears. Arthur exhaled again, a long sigh, and wished for the millionth time that things could be different: that his mother could be consistent, contained, a _secure base,_ as they said in Arthur’s line of work. Someone a kid could attach himself to without getting hurt, without getting burned. That she could have been _his mother_. Hell, that she could have been Bea’s mother after Caty died so that Arthur could have had his twenties, could have enjoyed a youth he’d finally seized, the way Yusuf and Ari and all of his friends had been able to do. No use, wishes like these. His mother would keep saying _she_ and sending Arthur the occasional passive-aggressive email. The three of them would not go out for dinner.

Beatrice was waiting in the car, like Arthur had asked him to. He was a good kid. The fucking best kid. Arthur stopped for a moment at the bottom of the steps to catch his breath, to let gratitude replace anger. B didn’t need him to be angry, to go on a rant and say shitty things about his grandmother. B needed Arthur to be calm, dependable; he could rant about his mom to Yusuf later…he could scream into his pillow…he could finally get a fucking therapist…Whatever. As long as he wasn’t dumping his feelings on Bea.

“Hey,” he said, climbing into the car and doing up his seat belt.

B had the radio on, a punky KALX show that was loud even at half-volume. He looked up from his phone when Arthur turned the music down. “Hey,” he said. “You escaped.”

“Yeah. Sorry it took longer than I thought it would. You okay? Was she—?”

Bea shrugged. “She wasn’t that bad. I mean, she mis-gendered me a lot, but I think she was genuinely worried about me being sick, so she was pretty chill, you know? She made me soup.”

“Oh. Well, okay. That’s—good, then.”

B looked back at his phone, and Arthur started to drive them home. “Do you still have stuff at Yusuf’s?”

“Yeah, but just some clothes and my toothbrush. We could get it later.” He paused. “I’m sorry I messed up your trip.”

“You didn’t mess it up,” Arthur said. “I mean, it was just a work thing. _I’m_ sorry you had to leave your camp early. We can enroll you in the one next month.”

They drove in silence for a few minutes, then apropos of nothing, B said, “You liked him, didn’t you?”

“What? Who?”

“That doctor.” Bea smiled down at his Tumblr feed. “That _handsome_ doctor.”

“Oh. Don’t you start.” But Arthur found that he was smiling too. That he was hungry to talk about Eames not with Ari or Yusuf but with someone who had met him, even if that person was eleven. _Pathetic._ He bit his lip, trying to preemptively check himself.

“I’ve never seen you like that, how you were in the office with him,” Bea confessed. “I was like, dang.”

“I don’t even know what you’re talking about.”

“You got all—” Bea scrunched his nose. “Blushy. And you were giving him this _look.”_ He contorted his face, trying to recreate the expression, fluttering his long eyelashes at Arthur—then gave up. “Nah, I can’t even do it. But it was really cute.”

“There is no way that I was that—that obvious,” Arthur said, kind of transported by the thought, kind of horrified.

“You were.”

“That’s—extremely embarrassing.” Oh my God, he wondered, did Dr. Eames notice? Maybe this was just one of those things where kids were preternaturally perceptive. It had been weeks since that appointment. How was Bea even still thinking about this?

Bea dropped his phone in his lap. “Oh no! Don’t freak out. I’m just teasing you. I think he liked it.”

“I know you’re teasing,” Arthur said, before he could exclaim, _how could you tell he liked me?_ “I didn’t tell you. That day we went into the city for your hair appointment, I saw him at the museum.”

“Oh my god, what? How come you never said?”

"I don’t know. It wasn’t—he didn’t—I mean, we just ran into each other. It wasn’t a big deal.”

“So you just said hi?”

“Not exactly. We got coffee and, uh, looked at some art together.”

“Oh my God, _what?”_

“Bea,” Arthur said. “It’s not that exciting.”

“What do  you mean, ‘it’s not that exciting!’ You had a date!” Bea shouted gleefully.

“It was _not_ a date. A date implies…I don’t know, intentionality. It was, like, an encounter. A friendly encounter.”

B drummed his heels on the dash. “You had a date!” he sang.

“It was not a date!” Arthur started to laugh, then caught himself. “It doesn’t matter, anyway. It’s not like we’re going to see him again.”

Bea stilled. “You think you won’t? Like you didn’t…get his number or anything?”

“Bea,” Arthur groaned. “No, of course not. He’s—well, he _was_ —your doctor. Besides, I thought he worked at Dr. Cobb’s office—that, you know, we could reach him there if we needed to.”

When Arthur next glanced over at him, Bea had a thoughtful look on his face, and he had begun to play with his phone again. “Yeah, that makes sense,” he said, and they lapsed into silence.

He was writing something on his phone when they pulled up in front of their building, but he tucked it away in the pocket of his hoodie with alacrity as soon as Arthur had parked.

“Take-out pho and Marvel movie marathon?” he asked, hopeful.

“Take-out pho, Marvel movie marathon, and early to bed,” Arthur amended.

Bea stifled a yawn. “Deal.”

 

   


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter brought to you by the mad beta skills of oceaxe and deinvati. :)

Suddenly it was June, Bea’s school year over and Pride weekend upon them. Friday afternoon, Arthur and Bea took the train to the city and walked in the Trans March with some of the boys and parents from Bea’s trans support group. They got pizza afterwards, and Arthur texted Yusuf a picture of all the kids with their rainbow face paint laughing over orange soda and pepperoni slices. (Arthur, who had done his due diligence texting with the other parents before the event, had prepared for the pizza temptation: he’d brought a gluten free, pesto and veggie-covered flatbread for Bea that at least looked like an acceptable pizza substitute, even if it wasn’t _pizza_.) In the picture, Bea looked really healthy and happy.

Yusuf texted back right away, echoing that sentiment and including a selfie of him and Ari waiting in line for the Trans March after party, making silly faces. _Come out with us tomorrow!_

Arthur stared at the picture a moment too long, until Bea leaned over and looked at Arthur’s phone. “You’ll go out with them, right?” he asked, shoving the last of his not-pizza into his mouth.

“I don’t know,” Arthur said. “Maybe.”

Bea brought the subject up again the next morning during their breakfast cereal and Saturday morning Adventure Time marathon routine. Arthur’s phone buzzed on the coffee table, and B tossed it to him. “Is that Yusuf?” he wanted to know.

Arthur looked at the screen and set the phone aside again. “Nah, it’s just someone from work.”

“You should go out tonight with Yusuf and Ari,” Bea declared. “You never go out anymore.”

“But who will stay with you?” The problem when all your friends were hella gay, Arthur thought, was that no one could babysit during Pride.

“I’ll—I’ll stay at grandma’s.”

Arthur choked on his Rice Crispies. “You’ll _what?”_

Bea shrugged. “She asked me if I wanted to come over.”

He held out his phone to show Arthur a text message that was in fact an invitation for Bea to go to his grandmother’s house and…to go to the theater to watch the new Ms. Marvel movie with her. _What._ Arthur stared. “Bea, you don’t have to do that,” he said finally.

“I know. I—I want to, though. She apologized to me.” Bea scrolled up through the text conversation for Arthur to see.

“Holy fuck,” he said.

Bea laughed.

“I mean—sorry—I’m surprised.” He looked at Bea’s smile, and thought about his kid—his kid who had liked Dr. Cobb alright because she was _positive,_ who had put up with immune system hell and months of an elimination diet with a brave face, who thought his grandmother wasn’t that bad because she made him soup. Arthur thought of his own fears, all icing and sprinkles on top of that foundational fear—that his mother would take Bea away from him and _crush_ Bea’s soul like she had sorta crushed Arthur’s. But Bea wasn’t Arthur, and Arthur’s mom couldn’t take Bea away from him. He was a good caregiver, and she was an old lady now. Not harmless, but not a monster, perhaps, and she wanted to see a superhero movie with Bea… “She’s trying,” he concluded, handing back the phone.

“Yeah, ‘think so.”

“And you really want to go.”

Bea nodded.

“Alright.” His fears probably shouldn’t hold back Beatrice from having a relationship with his grandmother. Fuck, Arthur was so responsible sometimes. He gazed up at the ceiling with a sigh.

“Okay there?” Bea asked, spoon halfway to mouth.

“Yeah.” Arthur exhaled slowly. “If anything happens or you want to come home for any reason, I want you to call me, alright?”

B rolled his eyes and gave his _whatever_ shrug, but he was smiling around his mouthful of cereal. “I know. I will.”

“Don’t talk with your mouth full,” Arthur said, and _whew,_ they were back on familiar ground, a normal kid and parent conversation. They made eye contact, and Arthur could see B thinking the same thing; they both began to laugh.  

Later in the morning, Arthur lay on his bed, staring at his phone.

 _I want to come out with you guys,_ he texted Ari.

_So come out. B can stay at one of his friend’s houses, can’t he?_

_He wants to stay at my mom’s house. She sent him this apology text, and now he has this idea that things can be different with her._

Ari didn’t text back for several moments, and then she responded with a picture—a screenshot of [a Nayyirah Waheed poem fragment, shared on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/p/Bd5cAxaB2cQ/?hl=en&taken-by=nayyirah.waheed)—

 

_cruel mothers are still mothers._

_they make us wars._

_they make us revolution._

_they teach us the truth. early._

_mothers are humans. who_

_sometimes give birth to their pain. instead of_

_children._

 

 _Come out today_ _,_ she said again, the plea a banner floating over the words Arthur kept reading, re-reading. _I feel like it will be okay._  
  
  
  
  
So the plan stood: Arthur was going out, Bea was going to his grandmother’s house.

Arthur put the car in park and took a deep breath. He could feel Bea’s eyes on him, curious—and rightly so. There weren’t very many things that made Arthur visibly want to sink into the upholstery and disappear, but a frank discussion about his mother was one of them.

“Are you okay?” Bea asked.

“There’s something I need to say to you before I drop you off. I was trying to find the words before, when we were having breakfast, but it took me a while.”

“Are you changing your mind? About me visiting _sabta?”_

Arthur took another steadying breath, stared at his hands resting atop the steering wheel. “No. I meant what I said about it being your decision. Just—the thing about my mother is that she’s unpredictable, and if you barrel on in life just being yourself, interacting with her like she’s a normal person, the same as anyone, you’ll drive yourself crazy trying to predict when she’ll be your ally, the caring person who loves and supports you, and when she’ll be your enemy, the person accusing you and tearing you down, blaming you for hurting her.”

“Oh.”

Making himself look over at Bea’s riveted stare, Arthur tried to smile, tried to rein in what he was saying; he sounded—intense. “When I was your age and a little older, I tried to give her as good as I got. I’d shout her down, cry sometimes even, I’d get so mad that we’d go head to head arguing.

“Then I got a little older, and I learned to be blank, to be a wall. I learned to just weather stuff, because it was easier when she was sorry after she went too far. And—and when Caty died, when I was still very young and you were a baby, I got really good at making sure all our interactions were designed to minimize risk of the bad stuff and maximize the chances for the good. Phone calls were good, topics like my school and career plans were good.” He ticked these off on his fingers.

“Don’t get me wrong, that was still exhausting, but I flattered myself that I was developing a knack for it, that I was more armored, less affected by her. Then you were a boy, and I saw how my mom reacted—how she responded when your great uncle Mark and I tried to talk with her, to educate her. I looked around me, at the genderqueer and trans and queer youth I was working with as a social worker, who couldn’t transition, who couldn’t be themselves, to the point where they wanted to hurt themselves or kill themselves—and I knew that equilibrium, that truce I’d worked out with her was _shit_ , that it didn’t matter. That the most important thing was getting you out and giving you the space to be yourself.”

Arthur paused and swallowed. His mouth felt dry and his head was fizzy with the unsteady feeling that preceded full-on anxiety, but the words were coming easier now. Bea didn’t seem lost or overwhelmed—not yet. He was still watching Arthur, wide-eyed, waiting. Arthur felt a pang, thinking about how Bea must feel stricken, thinking _why are you telling me this?_

“I’m telling you this because—well, I know how damaging it is to hear your—your parent say terrible things about your other parent—or your other family. And I’ve tried really hard not to do that, not to say anything disparaging about your _sabta—_ ‘cause that’s a lot to put on a kid. But I feel like I’m stuck in the middle, because it’s also wrong, I believe, to send a kid in unprepared to face someone with such a substantial power to wound.” He ran a hand through his hair. “I mean, it would be insulting to even suggest you’re unprepared, because you _were_ there five years ago, you experienced it. I know those memories live up in the attic with the glittery tops and skirts, with the—the—”

“Sparkly lace monster?” Bea offered softly.

“Yeah, the sparkly lace monster. Fuck, I don’t want all that history to go unacknowledged—or for you to feel any sort of burden around giving your grandma a second chance at the expense of your feelings and wellbeing. You’ve been so strong, _always,_ and you’re almost twelve…and I want to just tell you this, at the risk of oversharing or putting too much on you. Because when it comes down to it, I realize I would rather put even a little too much on you than risk a scenario where you’re internalizing my mom’s shit—which is _hers._ I don’t want you to feel guilty, like you somehow caused her to treat you in ways that are unfair.”

There, there it was, what he’d needed to say. All the cards on the table.

“Does that make sense?” he finished, trying to make the question gentle instead of a strained plea for confirmation that he was doing the right thing, having this conversation.

Bea nodded. He was frowning, but he reached out and took Arthur’s hand; it was hard to tell if it was reassurance or if he was claiming comfort from Arthur, Arthur his shelter in all storms. “It makes sense, I think,” he said finally. “You don’t want me to get hurt.”

“I love you, and I don’t want you to get hurt,” Arthur affirmed. “But we do all get hurt in relationships, and some relationships are way more hurtful than others. It’s like—”

“A cost-benefit analysis?”

“Yes, exactly.” God, his kid was so smart. “Mostly what I’m trying to say is that whatever happens with your grandma, it’s not _your_ fault. And—and it’s not okay for her to say hurtful things to you.”

“Yeah,” Bea breathed. “It’s not okay.”

“When I say you can call me if you decide it’s too much, I mean it.”

Bea sighed.

 _“And_ because I know you, and I know how important it is to you that I have this night out with Yusuf and Ari, I talked to Connor’s mom, and if you decide you want to stay the night at his house, you can call or text her or Connor, alright?”

“Oh, okay,” Bea said. “But you didn’t have to—I’ll be fine—”

“I know. I’m just saying, you don’t have to be fine, if you aren’t. Like, ever, okay? Put Jenn’s number in your phone.” Arthur pulled out his phone and dictated the number to B, who dutifully entered and saved it. “You can call her anytime too, okay, even in the middle of the night. They live right down the street.”

 _“I know.”_ Bea squirmed. “I’ll be okay, Arthur.”

He smiled again, more easily this time. “What, am I fussing too much?”

“Yeah, a _little,”_ Bea huffed. He gave Arthur an exaggerated grimace.

“It’s a hard life.” Arthur leaned over and pulled him into a sort of side-hug, kissing his curls. He dug out his wallet and gave Bea twenty dollars. “Okay, have fun at the movies. Buy your grandma some Junior Caramels. Those are her favorite.”

“Bye! Love you!” Bea shoved the twenty into his jeans pocket and kissed Arthur’s cheek, then hopped out of the car with his backpack and ran up the steps to the house. Arthur’s mother must have been waiting, because she opened the door before he knocked and stepped out onto the porch.

Arthur watched his mother bend her thin, aging body—so familiar and unfamiliar all at once—to scoop Bea into a hug. She straightened and waved at Arthur. Heart still pounding with adrenaline, yet somehow lighter, Arthur waved back.  
  
  
  
  
Arthur had made a deal with himself that if he managed that conversation with Bea and lined up an escape route with Connor’s mother, he would do his best to not worry and to actually enjoy himself. So on Saturday afternoon, with a reasonably clear head, Arthur met up with Yusuf and went into the city for Dyke March. They got off the train at 16th and Mission and fell into step behind a stream of rainbow-bedecked people on their way to Dolores Park.

“Oh my God, there are the most people here. Why do I always forget how many people there are at this thing?” Arthur grumbled, as Yusuf took his hand and they dove into the crowd that filled the sidewalk bisecting the park.

Halfway up the hill, Yusuf decided they’d pretty much reached the D3 section where Ari and friends ostensibly were chilling, and they ventured into the grass, snaking this way and that around blankets and coolers and bodies. People were sunbathing, dancing, sitting or standing in clusters, talking with their friends and their sweethearts and their secret crushes, with the coworker or old acquaintance they’d just run into—the immensity of the festive crowd managing to throw one’s entire gay life in the Bay at one’s feet, the queer magic of Pride. It was truly labyrinthine. The two of them ducked beneath shade structures and waved hello to cute folks who called up at them as they wandered according to some logic Yusuf and Ariadne’s texts had dictated.

“Are you sure we’re going to find Ari in this mess?” Arthur asked. They paused a moment so that Yusuf could reorient himself, and Arthur had a chance to look down the hill at the rainbow masses and out over the city—which was gorgeous today, lit up by the sun, the gold accents of Mission High School glowing, the palm trees that skirted Dolores holding their fronds aloft in a blue, blue sky. It was like the park had generously shared its little, perpetual patch of sun with the whole foggy city.

“Yeah, I think she’s just up the hill a bit more,” Yusuf said, squeezing Arthur’s hand; he dropped his phone back to his side and stared out at the vista too. “I know it’s crazy, and we’ve done it a million times, but I love it,” he said softly. “I love all these people.”

“I love them too,” Arthur said. “Remember our first Pride?”

“Do you remember that woman who sold us beer out of her cooler at the parade?”

“And you had just turned seventeen. You were _so_ excited.”

“No one has ever been that excited about a lone Modelo.” Yusuf laughed. “And you let me put glitter on your face.”

“Man, I think some of it’s still there, twelve years later.”

They were both laughing, and Yusuf raised a hand to Arthur’s chin, turning his head this way then that gently in faux-serious search of the glitter remnants. “Right…aha!…there!” His thumb brushed the slope of Arthur’s cheekbone. “You should wear glitter more often.”

Arthur stepped in and kissed him. It was just another kiss in a sea of sweet queer kisses today, which was lovely, which made Arthur smile as they rested their foreheads together for a moment.

“Happy Pride,” Yusuf murmured.

“Happy Pride. I feel like this is going to be a good one.” Arthur let himself bury his fingers in Yusuf’s curls.

“Mm. Last year was good too,” Yusuf said, leaning into the touch, “Getting here early and picnicking with Bea, walking the Trans March together.”

“Yeah, that was—that was wonderful.”

“We’ll do that again next year,” Yusuf promised. “Now that Bea’s better.”

It was true. Arthur hardly dared to echo the words for fear of jinxing it, but it was no longer merely a hope, a wish; Bea was manifestly getting better, feeling better, every day now. He still had an early bedtime and an allergen free diet, but it had been nearly a month since his last bad day. “Yeah,” he said, finally. “Now that Bea’s healthy.”

They drew apart so that Yusuf could puzzle over Ari’s directions yet again.

“You two are cute,” said a woman with a lilting French accent who was perched on a blanket practically at their feet.

“The cutest,” Yusuf agreed. “Come on. I think they’re just a bit further this way, by that orange umbrella.”

Arthur waved at the French woman as they walked away. She and her girlfriend blew him kisses.  
  
  
  
  
Yusuf’s navigational wizardry led them true. No sooner had they rounded the orange umbrella than Arthur heard Ari bellow, “Yusuf! Arthur! Over here!”

Arthur twisted around and, yes, there she was, waving an arm over her head. She was sprawled out on the grass in the center of a cluster of people, draped in a sparkly black feather boa. She looked just as stylish in long, cut-off jean shorts, a tank-top, and shades as she usually did in the sleek get-ups that were the required wear of the salon school and the clubs she DJed. Arthur saw their friend Su sitting cross-legged between the orange-haired receptionist from the salon and a scruffy, bear of a man who also DJed, but he didn’t recognize the other people in their group—a few older, several probably his age or younger. There was a lean, dark haired man with intense eyes, studying Arthur and Yusuf as he sipped a beer. A beardy dude in leather. A woman cradling a French bulldog in her lap. A built guy with tats in a black mesh tank top, sitting with his back to Arthur.

“Arthur!” Ari hollered again.

She was just leaping up to hug him, Arthur was just opening his mouth to greet her, when the guy with the tattoos looked around, and _—oh my God._ It was Eames.

Arthur nearly tripped over his feet. They stared at each other.

It wasn’t that Arthur was stunned by the coincidence—because fucking hell, _yes,_ he _knew_ he was going to find Eames again! He was more bewildered by the failure of that inner, knowing spidey-sense to give him fair warning. Happy, glittery, arm in arm with Yusuf, stumbling up on Ari’s crew with shouts and cheers: this was not a meet-cute in the heart of a sculpture, wandering hands and witticisms on the exam table. This was not how he would have chosen to run smack into Eames again.

“Oh, ah—Dr. Eames!” Arthur considered dropping Yusuf’s hand but thankfully thought better of it; that would look…weird. But, oh, _fuck_ , what should he do?

“Arthur.” Eames’s eyes slid between Arthur and Yusuf with a question.

Yusuf, ever perceptive, grinned at Eames. “Oh, this is the handsome doctor!” he said, lighting up with delight, releasing Arthur’s hand to sling an arm around Arthur and squeeze his shoulders.

“Hello,” Arthur said, voice level—barely. Would anyone notice if he stepped on Yusuf’s foot? Of course, Yusuf was wearing his stompiest leather combat boots for Pride, so the gesture wouldn’t accomplish much.

Apparently, this interaction was enough for Eames to glean the way things were between Arthur and Yusuf. Fuck, he was so clever in addition to being funny and hot. Eames’s shoulders relaxed, and he grinned back at Yusuf. “Hello.”  

“This must be the hot dad,” one of Eames’s friends volunteered.

“Uncle,” Arthur corrected automatically.

“I can’t believe you two know each other,” Ari enthused, holding out beers to them. Yusuf let go of Arthur and crouched next to Ari to pry off the beer tops with his keys. Arthur just stared at Eames until the doctor gestured that Arthur should sit next to him.

Arthur knelt on a corner of beach blanket, accepted his beer. “Wait!” he said. “Ari, the fuck? You and Eames know each other—?”

“No.” Ari held her palms up, placating. “We just met. Apparently we’re both friends with Su.”

“Hot uncle just doesn’t have the same cache,” the dark-haired man was saying.

“Disagree!” his beardy friend chimed in. “I find it _very_ fulfilling to be an uncle—you get to _spoil_ your boy in a way a daddy just doesn’t get to do when he’s keeping discipline.”

Arthur sputtered on his beer. “This conversation has jumped the shark. I am a literal uncle of a literal child.”

“I, however, would love to continue this conversation with you,” Yusuf said, sitting down by the older man. “Discipline. Spoiling. Tell me more.”

Ari snickered as Arthur shifted and tried to settle next to Eames on the blanket. His head was still reeling over the coincidence—Eames _here_. He could feel Eames staring at him, but the doctor had barely spoken. What if he didn’t—what if he wasn’t—

Eames cleared his throat. “So, he’s not your—ah—boyfriend?”

Arthur looked up from shredding the label on his beer bottle into hesitant green eyes. Shook his head. “That guy?” He raised his eyebrows and gestured to Yusuf, who was already getting his flirt on, leaning into his new buddy’s space with one hand on his shoulder. “He’s my best friend. We grew up together.”

“Oh.” Pulling a piece of paper—no, a folded card—from his wallet, Eames said, “I, ah, just got this card from your nephew.”

“What?” Arthur took the folded piece of thick paper with a wobbly drawing of Kamala Khan on the front, the words _To Doctor Eames_ written beneath in B’s block print. He stared and stared at the drawing because he was too flustered to hold Eames’s gaze.

Eames shifted beside him, perhaps feeling similarly awkward. “Dr. Cobb’s office forwarded it to me.”

“I thought they didn’t know where you went,” Arthur said without thinking, and Eames gave him an amused look. He reached out and pulled the card open, his fingers brushing Arthur’s in the process with a lovely electric jolt.

“Go ahead. You can read it.”

Arthur took a deep breath. The card said:

 

> _Hi Dr. Eames,_
> 
> _I hope you get this card. I want to thank you for all your help. I know we only met once, but you are the most helpful doctor that I have worked with. (And I have worked with a lot now.) You really listened to me and believed me when I described my symptoms, and you were totally right about the sleep study thing. (Turns out I have sleep apnea and have not been getting enough oxygen when I sleep!) I think I am finally starting to feel less sick, and if it wasn’t for you, I’d probably still be clueless, getting allergy tested every two weeks. Arthur and I were super sad to hear that you were gone, but I know that wherever you are, you are helping lots of people and being awesome. I hope when I’m older I can do work that changes people’s lives, like you and my uncle Arthur._
> 
> _Anyway, thank you again & take care! _
> 
> _YT,_
> 
> _Beatrice Jolet_
> 
> _P.S. The only good thing about you not being my doctor anymore is that I think it makes it more okay for me to tell you that you should totally ask my uncle out. If you are single. Which I think you might be because of the way I saw you looking at him. Anyway, he_ _really _ _likes you, and he never likes anyone that way, so I wanted to make sure you got a chance to talk to him again if you are interested. His number is 510 768 9499. (You should text him!!!!) :)_

  
  
“Oh my god,” Arthur said. His face was reddening with embarrassment because of the postscript, but his voice was thick with emotion because of the rest of the card.  

“I guess it’s kismet, running into you here,” Eames said.  He accepted the card from Arthur’s shaking hand and slid it back into his wallet.

“You keep it in your wallet?”

“I’ve kept it there this week. Feedback like that—knowing that I’ve helped people like your kid—it’s, you know, the good stuff, the sustaining stuff, when this work feels too hard. That’s not weird, is it?”

Arthur shook his head. He kept a few drawings and thank you cards from old clients in the outer pocket of his work laptop bag, still pulled them out and reread them when he was having a bad day.

“I mean, I usually don’t keep the cards I get in my wallet,” Eames went onto explain, looking sheepish. “It’s also there because—“

“The postscript?” Arthur blurted, equal parts hopeful and embarrassed.

“Yeah. I was working up my nerve to call you. But I wasn’t sure it was what you wanted. I thought maybe it was your—Bea setting us up, and that you’d be, ah, horrified or something.”

“He’s a smart kid, and he takes initiative.” Arthur smiled. “He hasn’t taken _that_ great of an interest in my love life though. I mean, he hasn’t had to resort to setting me up with random guys we meet—it’s not that desperate. I think he noticed that I liked you. I do like you.” Jesus. Arthur coughed and pressed the back of his hand against his mouth in an attempt to keep himself from rambling further.

Eames just smiled back at him. Oh, his lips, his pretty greenish eyes. “I like you too, Arthur.”

“You do?”

He raised his eyebrows. “How are you so surprised?”

“Uh, the first time we met you looked at my tongue because you thought I was neurologically impaired.”

Eames snorted. “Would it damage my credibility as a professional if I told you I just really wanted to see your tongue?”

“Ah! I _knew_ that wasn’t a real thing.”

“It is too a real thing. Hey Saito,” he said, turning to the guy behind him, “Isn’t it a real thing that you can check a person’s tongue symmetry to test for neurological impairment?”

Saito gazed at them calmly, no sign that he was putting Arthur on. “Yep.”

“Wait, are you all doctors?” Arthur looked in amazement around the group.

“A few of us, yeah. We’re doctors and RNs and medical social workers. Eames and I did our residencies together down in LA.” Recognizing a captive audience in Arthur, Saito went on, “Did Eames ever tell you about his first thirty hour shift? He backed his car into a cement wall in the parking garage and gave no fucks.”

“Hey, I just wanted to get home and sleep at that point!” Eames protested.

“Or about the time he was so sick he did his rounds dragging an IV around with him because the attending wouldn’t let him go home—?”

“Oh my God,” Arthur said. “Is this what the practice of medicine is like? I can’t believe I let you lunatics treat my kid.”

“We’re much more civilized now,” Saito said, adjusting his backwards ball cap. “Want to shotgun a beer?”

“Yes!” Ari whooped, jumping to her feet.  
  
  
  
  
A while (and one shot-gunned beer) later, Arthur said, “It’s kind of weird, but I had this feeling we would meet each other again. Even without Bea’s intervention, I mean.”

“Yeah,” Eames said softy. “I did too. Though you can bet I was kicking myself for not chasing you out of that museum into the street.”

“I know,” Arthur said. “God, I can’t believe I ran off like that. But here we are.” He gestured around Dolores Park—filled with people in their rainbow plumage, laughing and listening to music, spread out in the sun.

“Hey buddies,” Ari said, putting her tiny hands on one of Eames’s shoulders and one of his, leaning between them, waggling her eyebrows in a tipsy, silly way. “Let’s go do the march! And then go dancing, okay?”

Arthur looked at Eames. He had some glitter swiped across his right cheekbone; there was no corresponding mark elsewhere on his face, so perhaps it was an unintentional acquisition. Arthur wanted to lick that glitter, to get it on _his_ skin and have it stick for the next twelve years. “Dancing?” he asked.

Eames wet his ruinous lips. “Alright. I should tell you, I’m not the best dancer.”

Two could play this game: Arthur bit his bottom lip, as if considering Eames’s confession. He watched Eames’s eyelashes flutter as he stared at Arthur’s mouth. “I think by dancing, Ari means getting happy-drunk and grinding up on each other,” Arthur said. “And I have a strong suspicion that you will be the best at that.”

“Darling,” Eames replied, voice all gravel and want, “You flatter me.”  
  
  
  
  
Arthur did not flatter Eames. His assessment was one hundred percent accurate, crazy accurate, _dangerously_ accurate, he thought, in a haze that was more lust than tequila. Eames moved against him, a slow, devastating grind that made Arthur want to whip around, take hold of Eames’s face, and demand to be fucked, flirtation and preamble be damned. Eames held his hips and pressed roaming kisses over Arthur’s shoulder, his neck, his ear.

Arthur was vaguely aware that their friends still existed nearby, drifting in and out of his peripheral vision, but they had given up trying to pull Eames and Arthur into dance circles or shots or new adventures, for the moment anyway.

After leaving the park, they had joined the march, trekking up Dolores, to 16th, then the Castro, before looping back and attempting to gain admittance to an after-party in a club. The march and standing in line had been an agony of rubbing elbows with Eames and exchanging smiles, unsure of _what next_ and whether it was okay to touch. Finally, Ari, Yusuf, and the uncle guy decided they were totally over the club, enlisted the support of some queer bike punks pedaling by with a sound system in their bike trailer, and roused the restless, chatting, cigarette-sharing line into a full-on street dance party. The bouncer turned a blind eye to their public drinking and mayhem, and she looked like she might join in the fun if not obligated to loom in the club threshold. She traded Ari a cigarette for her phone number and seemed in a cheerful mood after that.

Arthur and Eames had watched the dancing from the sidelines for only a moment before Yusuf materialized and flung his arms over their shoulders.

“Hey,” he said conspiratorially, leaning further into them till they were all practically bumping noses, “Hey Arthur, this dude you picked up is pretty fit. Think I can get him to dance with me?”

“Fuck off,” Arthur laughed, wrestling free. Eames was grinning at them. Arthur felt his heart clench in his chest. He grabbed Eames’s hands and pulled him into the crowd, while Yusuf slow-clapped and then possibly Snapchatted them, the ass.

“You do things to my heart,” Arthur shouted over the bass. Everyone around them was jumping around to “Break Free,” but somehow he and Eames were pressed slow-dance-close, Eames’s hands experimentally running up Arthur’s spine to curl around his neck.

“Premature ventricular contractions,” he murmured. His gaze kept flicking between Arthur’s eyes and his mouth.

“What?”

“Premature ventricular contractions,” Eames repeated. He raised his eyebrows; he seemed to be stroking a hand through Arthur’s hair. “I make your heart skip a beat, hmm?”

Arthur laughed. “Oh my God, talk medical to me, yes.”

Eames’s fingers brushed against the corner of Arthur’s mouth, his bottom lip. “That what does it for you?” His brows were still quirked, and he was grinning, but Arthur didn’t need a therapist’s training to hear the undercurrent of unease beneath the question.

He shook his head. “No, just you. You do it for me.”

Eames’s grin slipped into a truer smile; it pretty much did Arthur in. “This premature vent-thing…”

“Ventricular contraction thing,” Eames corrected softly.

“It isn’t something I have to worry about, right? Because you make it happen…a lot.”

“Don’t worry. I’ll take care of you.”

“Mm, please,” Arthur said, and then they were kissing. Fuck no, they were making out, and it was _glorious,_ teeth and spit and Arthur’s knees about to buckle. Eames’s hands tightened on Arthur’s waist, sliding beneath the hem of his shirt to find skin. Those plush lips were everything Arthur had imagined for so many months, and he licked into Arthur’s mouth with such intensity, Arthur couldn’t keep from making embarrassing small noises of dazed pleasure.

When Eames pulled back, Arthur exhaled carefully to cover the way he was panting. His fingers were pressed against the mesh fabric of Eames’s shirt. “This shirt,” he said. “It’s nice.”

“I don’t know.” Eames looked down and pulled a face, managing to radiate pleasure anyway. “Saito made me wear it.”

“Um, he’s a genius.”

Eames’s black mesh tank top revealed not only an array of very interesting and lickable muscles but also a spill of tattoos that definitely warranted further, careful exploration. It felt nice to the touch too, as Arthur ran his hands over Eames’s back.

Eames hauled him close again. “Do you want to get out of here?” he murmured against Arthur’s mouth.

“Fuck yes.”

“You don’t have to—you don’t have a—a—?”

“A curfew?” Arthur asked, amused. “No, I’m all yours, all night.”

“Oh.” Eames melted against him.

“Do you want to go back to yours or mine?” Arthur gasped back from another kiss. “Wait, whichever’s closest. D’you live in the city?”

“Downtown Oakland right now,” Eames said, sounding rueful.

“And I’m—”

“By the lake.”

“You remember.”

“Mmhm.”

Arthur nipped at his ear, kissed his neck.

“Oh.” Eames shuddered. “Let’s just—away from the crowd—we can call a—”

“Yeah.” Arthur ran fingertips over the glitter on Eames’s cheek that had entranced him at the park. There was glitter in Eames’s stubble. Arthur thought he might lick his face. It was hard to remember they were in public, in the middle of a street. Yet when Arthur looked around them, he realized that the dance party was in full force—and that he and Eames wouldn’t be out of place if they shed half their clothes and the slim remnant of their personal space.

He craned his head and saw Su and the salon receptionist making out behind them. Ari was perched in the bouncer’s lap at the door, smoking a cigarette with Saito. Who knew where Yusuf had disappeared—well, probably the uncle guy knew…

Fuck it, he’d text them later.

Eames took Arthur’s hand. “Lead the way, darling.”  
  
  
  
  
They stumbled out to Market Street to catch a Lyft, and Arthur settled into the sedan upholstery to wait out the most excruciatingly bridge traffic of his life; he kept his grip on Eames’s hand to stop himself from feeling him up in front of their taciturn driver, a sleepy-eyed woman in a SFSU sweatshirt. When she dropped them off in front of his apartment, he felt compelled to tip her mightily for not attempting to cut the sexual tension in the car with awkward small talk.

“This is my building,” he rambled, pulling Eames up the front steps. “My apartment’s on the second floor. Those are the windows to my room, actually. It overlooks the street. Bea’s staying the night at his grandmother’s, so, um, yeah, but you’ll meet our dog, Iggy. She can be really loud, but she’s sweet. Um, sorry in advance about all the mess—”

“You have a dog,” Eames cut in, squeezing Arthur’s hand. “I love dogs.”

They were at the door to the apartment now, and Arthur was fumbling for the lone key he’d slid into the front pocket of his tight jeans. Eames crowded him, running hands over his waist. True to form, Iggy began to bark on the other side of the door.

“Oh my God, sorry.” He fumbled the door open. Iggy jumped up on Arthur, her spindly legs scrambling against his jeans, then she whirled to greet Eames. Eames dropped to a crouch and let her snuffle his palms. When Iggy nosed at his face and licked his chin, he laughed like she’d told him a good joke. He really did love dogs, even Arthur’s bad mannered couch potato of a dog, who looked like a cross between a potbellied pig and a hyena.

Eames looked up at Arthur. He was scratching Iggy’s belly now. “What a good dog,” he said, delighted and clearly sincere.

“She’s a ridiculous dog,” Arthur replied. “But thanks. Do you want to come in?”

“Will she forgive me?”

“For ending the belly scratches so soon? I think so. She doesn’t hold grudges. She’s really smart.” He ruffled Iggy’s floppy ears as she bounded ahead of them into the apartment. “So, um, this is it.” He resisted the urge to wave his arms like Vanna White. “Do you want a drink or anything?”

“Uh, sure.” Eames followed him across the living room and into the kitchen. He began to wash his hands very thoroughly in the sink while Arthur stared at the beverage contents of his fridge in an aroused daze that was edging a little too close to anxiety. “I haven’t done this in a while,” he said, addressing the orange juice and half six-pack on the top shelf. “Brought anyone home. Not since I’ve had Bea.”

Eames hummed thoughtfully behind him. The water splashed in the sink.

“I mean, I’ve been with people. Just not here, at home. At their places, or out—at bars and stuff.” He put a hand over his face. Why was he still talking?

There was a long moment of silence. Arthur grabbed two beers from the fridge and turned to face Eames.

“You’re telling me I didn’t have to sit through a thirty minute cab ride to get in your pants?” Eames asked. “Shit.”

“You’re scrubbing your hands like a TV surgeon.” Arthur leaned against the counter to watch, beers in hand. He kind of giggled.

“Well, I was petting the dog,” Eames said, looking sheepish. “And I’d rather be petting you now. It’s only hygienic.”

Arthur laughed and tossed a dish towel at him. Eames liberated the beers from Arthur’s grasp, set them on the counter, then pulled Arthur into his arms. “I like your place,” he said very seriously. “It’s nice. I live out of sublets, so I guess you could say I never get to bring people _home_ either.”  

“Want to see my bedroom?” Such a line—but Arthur couldn’t wait any longer.

“Mmhm.”

Arthur led Eames to his room, which was dimly lit by the early evening sun through the branches outside the windows. He watched Eames glance around, curious but clearly distracted by Arthur’s touch. Arthur was running his hands over Eames’s delightful tank top, enjoying it for a final moment before he peeled it off over Eames’s muscled shoulders.

Jesus, he was hot.

“Can I take off these tight jeans of yours?” Eames asked, looking similarly transfixed. He tugged at Arthur’s waistband.

“Yeah. Wait, let me just…shoes…”

They sat at the edge of the mattress, Arthur kicking off his sneakers, Eames unlacing his boots. Arthur had barely gotten himself free of both socks when, with a groaned curse, Eames pulled him onto his lap. He held Arthur against his chest, like he had when they were dancing. Eames’s breath on his neck, at his ear—Arthur shuddered.

“What was that? What did I do?” Eames stilled, eager.

“The back of my neck,” Arthur gasped. “It’s one of my—spots.”

Eames pressed another kiss against Arthur’s nape, and Arthur shivered, arching back against him.

“God, I feel that everywhere. Do it again,” he begged.

He felt Eames’s arms tighten around his waist, felt Eames’s hardness press against his ass, the small of his back. Heard him swallow thickly. “Fuck, Arthur. Fuck, you’re so…” He rubbed his face against Arthur’s neck, and Arthur moaned.

Eames spread Arthur’s thighs wide on his lap and ran his hands up his inseams.

“Who _are_ you?” Arthur panted, rocking back against him. “Jesus. How did I even find you?”

“Could ask you the same thing.” Eames fumbled Arthur’s fly open with one hand, the other holding him, flat against his stomach—and why was _that_ so hot? He licked his hand, freed Arthur’s cock, and then ran his palm slowly over his length, like he was exploring the shape and weight of him. Arthur whimpered. “The way you stumbled into my office. Could barely keep it together, wanted to spread you on that exam table. Very unprofessional.”

“Oh, _fuck._ I thought about that too. You undressing me, fucking me in your office. Thought about you here in bed with me like this, waking me up in the middle of the night with your hands on my cock—”

Eames froze. “You thought about that?”

“Got off every night thinking about you.” He wriggled until Eames began to move again.

_“Arthur—”_

“You did tell me to take care of myself,” he murmured, as they fell into a rhythm.

“Oh, so you were following my orders.” Eames pulled him back by his hair to brush a kiss over Arthur’s smirk. “What else did you imagine me doing to you?”

“Mmm. Thought about you biting bruises on to my neck.”

Eames’s breath caught. “Can I?”

 _Yes, please, of course,_ Arthur wanted to shout. Could he—could he really be such a succession of surprises for Eames? The guys Arthur had dated before had touched him with hunger, appreciation—but somehow, they were always stripping him down, even when they’d already gotten him bare. Perpetually trying to get to the goods. With Eames it felt different, like he was taking his time trying to really see Arthur, to get him in focus. Like Arthur was wonderful just as he was, something complete and lovely to look upon.  
  
Licking his lips, voice somehow steady, Arthur managed to say, “You can mark me up. Just not too high.”

“Here?” Eames touched Arthur’s throat so lightly with his thumb.

“Lower.”

“Here?”

“Yes,” Arthur sighed.

Eames pressed his lips to a spot above Arthur’s collarbone. Soft lips, licking, nipping his skin—then biting, a sharp, delicious spike of pain. He sucked on the bite until Arthur was fucking up into his fist wildly, overcome. When Eames pulled back, he nuzzled Arthur’s neck, pressed his face into Arthur’s hair.

“You smell really nice,” he murmured. “Sorry, I just keep thinking about it.”

Arthur laughed, then choked on the sound as Eames shifted his hand, putting pressure on the sensitive spot beneath the head of his cock. He could feel Eames grinding against him. They were still wearing far too many clothes, and yet, the tight, possessive way Eames held him made Arthur hesitate to move, to rush things along.

“S’a good mark?” he asked.

“Mm.” Eames licked at the curve of his ear.

“Do it again.” It made him blush to hear himself, but he couldn’t stop begging.

Eames obeyed without hesitation, placing his mouth on Arthur’s throat. “God, you’re beautiful,” he said against Arthur’s skin.

This declaration, simple as it was, sparked something confessional in Arthur. “Eames,” he said, “before I even saw you, when I first heard your voice—that was it, just your voice. I was so wrecked, standing there in the door, thinking, _fuck,_ I can’t be thinking this way about the doctor. I haven’t even seen him. But I knew how fucking hot you’d be—”

“Oh,” Eames said, all rough and breathy, like Arthur’s voice was turning _him_ on. His slick palm and quick, teasing strokes were driving Arthur crazy. He had been right, all those weeks ago: Eames had gorgeous, deft hands. He seemed to want to work Arthur right to his edges and let him linger there—torture, heady and perfect.

“Fuck,” Eames said, “you’re killing me.” He paused, and Arthur heard him swallow. “I want to feel you come like this. Hold you while you’re shuddering, while you lose it, watch you make a mess. Bet you come all over this tight stomach of yours, ruin these fancy jeans. You’ve got it bad, don’t you, baby. You’re going to make a fucking mess—”

Arthur groaned.

“But I—fuck, I also want to put you down on this bed and get my mouth on you. I wonder if you’d last even a moment with my mouth on you, if I swallowed your cock,” Eames said, his voice a thoughtful rasp against Arthur’s ear.

Eames’s mouth. Oh. Jesus fuck. Arthur’s thoughts were staccato bursts, incoherent, a strange poetry scattered amidst Eames’s soft promises. The scrape of Eames’s stubble against his neck _—please, I’m so close—_ and, beneath it all, an unremitting wonder _—how was this happening?_ How had he not only found Eames again but had landed him in bed?

“You’re wrecking me Arthur, making me choose.”

 _I want everything,_ Arthur tried to say, but Eames’s hand on him quickened. Eames was hot and steady behind him, and Arthur felt surrounded. He yelled as he came, awareness dim, thoughts a white-out, as Eames kept stroking him, murmuring encouragement. Eames ran his hand slick with come over Arthur’s stomach, up to tease at his nipples, and Arthur’s vision cleared. There was come at this throat, beneath his chin. He was limp, sweaty, cradled in Eames’s arms. Fuck.

“Hey,” Eames whispered.

“Hey.” He turned his head to try to catch Eames’s mouth in a kiss.

God, he could feel how hard Eames was against him—but patient, just holding him. That little detail, and suddenly it was urgent. Arthur pushed Eames’s arms away, slid to the floor to settle between his thighs with more enthusiasm than grace—damn, he could feel the tingling aftershocks of that orgasm in every corner of his body, and his limbs were shaking. Struggling past zips and buttons, he grabbed Eames’s cock, thick and leaking. Arthur pulled back his foreskin gently, licked him, then tipped his head up to finally get a good look at Eames. His wet lips were parted, and he was staring at Arthur with this incredible reverence.

Eames leaned back on his hands and spread his legs, shifting closer to the edge of the bed, as Arthur pulled at him, impatient. His hips twitched when Arthur licked the length of him, and his smooth words seemed to dry up all at once. That stunned silence was suddenly as arousing as Eames’s rumbling voice. Arthur didn’t fuck around: he swallowed him as best as he could, flicking his tongue against the head of Eames’s cock, taking him down his throat again and again. It only took a moment before one of Eames’s hands gripped Arthur’s hair, and Arthur was sucking him while he came. He was quiet, far quieter than Arthur, but Arthur was entranced by his short, gasping breaths.

Trying to catch his own breath, he rested his cheek against Eames’s thigh and looked up at him again.

“C’mere—” Eames leaned forward and grabbed Arthur. Pulled him up onto the bed, flopping backwards, so Arthur was sprawled on top of him. “Fuck,” he said, happily, and began to rub circles on Arthur’s back.

“Mm.” Arthur answered, a dazed exhalation.

They lay like that for what seemed like a long time. Arthur felt very connected to his breath, to Eames’s breathing, in a quiet way he had never quite managed when forced into mindfulness exercises.

They must have dozed; when he was aware again, it was twilight. Eames had resumed petting his back. Arthur lifted his head, and Eames rolled them onto their sides, so they lay face to face.

“What time is it?” Arthur asked.

“M’not wearing my watch.” Eames smiled at him.

“God, but we’re still wearing our clothes.” Arthur’s limbs felt loose and warm. He knew, objectively, he should feel self-conscious or—at the very least—unpleasantly sticky. They were disheveled, their pants undone, their bare chests covered in dried come, but Arthur couldn’t summon the will to move or to care.

“Mm, seems like it’ll be dark soon,” Eames volunteered. “I bet it’s…seven?”

Arthur wrinkled his nose. “I can’t believe it’s only seven.”

“This is what comes with day drinking.”

“We didn’t even really drink that much though.”

“No, we were too busy.”

“Are you hungry? We could go out and grab some food. Or just…order delivery,” Arthur said helplessly, as Eames climbed on top of him, kissing his collarbone—likely right where he had left a bruise. “That’s what I—ah—usually do.” He arched up as Eames kissed his jaw, captured his lower lip.

“Delivery sounds good,” Eames said.

“Okay. We should do that—at some point—later—”

They moved against each other, in a way that was sweet but quickly became frantic.

“Would you—ah—finger me?” Arthur asked, pulling back from a kiss.

“You like that?”

He nodded. “I want you inside me—please—”

“Where’s your—?”

“Drawer,” Arthur panted. “Don’t stop talking.”

Eames grinned. “A man after my heart.”

He rummaged in the nightstand drawer, then pulled out the lube with a triumphant “aha!” that made Arthur laugh from where he was waiting eagerly for Eames to slick his fingers, to rub against his hole and push inside him.

Obedient, Eames purred and rambled against his ear in soft cadences as he worked Arthur open. “You’re getting so wet and loose for me—fuck, you like this, don’t you, pet? God, I bet you’d look so good taking my cock right now. Is that what I’m doing, love? Am I stretching you so you can take my cock?”

Arthur nearly sobbed. “You’re so—big.”

“You’d be so tight around me, wouldn’t you?”

“Please—oh, please _—fuck_ —I want you so much—”

“What do you want, sweetheart?” The twist of Eames’s fingers brought Arthur’s hips bucking up, then fucking down on him, wanting more.

 _“You_ —I want your cock—I want you to fuck me—”

“Yeah?” Eagerness warred with concern in Eames’s expression. He needed to know Arthur was sure.

“Eames.” Arthur clutched him, desperate. How could he communicate how _entirely sure_ he was when it was difficult to form coherent sentences? “There are condoms in the drawer there.”

Eames withdrew his fingers gently, then fumbled again in the nightstand drawer. “Do you have any latex free?”

“Yeah, they all are. Don’t use that one,” Arthur instructed, “There’s a bigger one—yeah—”

Eames brought the wrapper to his eyes to squint at the expiration date, which made Arthur weirdly happy. He tore it open with shaking fingers and rolled it onto his cock, Arthur’s hands reaching to help, eager. He stroked more lube onto himself and into Arthur, then leaned over Arthur to kiss him hungrily before hitching his hips up and pressing into him, the movement slow, controlled.

“Fuck,” Arthur moaned, clutching at Eames’s waist, at the taut muscles of his back.

Eames sucked air through his teeth, greenish eyes fluttering closed for a moment as he pushed deeper, until Arthur was taking him to the hilt. “You’re—so—tight—” he breathed, each word punctuated by a steadying breath. “Fuck, Arthur, is this—?”

“It’s good, it’s good,” Arthur babbled. “You feel so good.”

Eames felt _amazing,_ the burn of him, the hot thick length of him buried in Arthur. Arthur wanted him to move so badly he could cry. _“Eames—”_

“Yeah—fuck—give me a second—I—” He closed his eyes. “Okay…okay.”

He began to rock into Arthur, gripping Arthur’s thigh, his other hand holding himself up—close so Arthur could almost kiss the soft inked skin of his inner arm when it all felt _too much,_ and he had to turn his face away. There was a bumblebee tattooed on Eames’s wrist, plump and fuzzy. Arthur stared at the delicate white highlights of its glossy wings when Eames shifted them and began to fuck against the spot that made him feel like he was going to fracture into a galaxy of pieces. He moaned.

“Yeah?” Eames’s temples were dark with sweat. He fucked Arthur faster, his eyes a little wild, his initial careful, slowness replaced by a fiercer need.

“Yeah,” Arthur echoed, daring to meet Eames’s gaze again. He could only imagine what naked adoration Eames would read in his expression, but fuck it, he didn’t care—it was worth it to watch Eames lose himself.

“Touch yourself,” Eames said.

Arthur made a strangled noise. “I’ll come. I’m almost—”

“I want to watch you.”

Pinned by Eames’s gaze, Arthur reached down and wrapped his fingers around his cock. His touch was like an echo of Eames’s—his familiar grip made slightly strange to him, like Eames’s hands on him had oh so slightly shifted the world. Being so full of Eames’s cock, already on the edge, he really wouldn’t last long if he—

Eames stretched to catch his mouth in a long, deep kiss. “Look at me?” he asked, pulling back. “God, I want to watch you come.”

Arthur chased his mouth with a little moan; his hand had fallen slack to his stomach. Eames’s fingers met his and they began to pull at his cock together—rough, no finesse, but bringing Arthur so close he was nearly sobbing for the release. When he finally spilled between them, staring into Eames’s pretty greenish eyes, Eames swore and thrust again and again, spending in Arthur with a groan.

He pulled out of Arthur carefully, then collapsed next to him.

After a moment, Arthur caught himself drifting, and he made himself get up to toss the condom and find a towel. Doing these things before his thoughts floated entirely out to space was the responsible thing. He smiled to himself as he stood before the sink, drinking a glass of water before he re-filled the cup for Eames. His body thrummed with a tingling heat that he hadn’t felt in a long time. _Eames,_ he thought. _Eames._ The kitchen and the living room were dark and silent, save for the flickering lights of the router, the thrumming of the fridge and the dehumidifier. Iggy stared at him balefully from the couch. It was nice to be here, _home,_ with Eames, instead of in some grimy bar bathroom in the Mission.

Arthur carried the water to Eames, then cleaned them up as best he could while Eames watched him, grinning and offering ineffectual help; Arthur just pushed his hands away, bemused, and wiped them both off briskly with the towel. Eames looked sleepy and sated, his hair an utter mess; he was so blissed out, Arthur had to prompt him to drink the water.

“I’ll be back in a minute,” he said, pulling on his shoes. “I’m going to take the dog out.”

“Should I, uh...?” Eames stirred, pushing himself up onto his elbows.

Arthur leaned over to kiss him, unsure of whether he was about to offer to accompany Arthur or to leave. “No, it’s okay. I’ll only be five minutes. Wait here for me.”

Eames slumped back into the pillows with a look of relief that made Arthur laugh his own relief. He didn’t want Eames to go; he wanted to have the rest of the night with him. He wanted to have the morning—coffee and a shower and Eames sharing his pillow. He wasn’t sure how to ask, so he just kissed him again, then extricated himself, still smiling, to meet Iggy at the door.

There were a few stars outshining the city glow, and Arthur looked up at them while Iggy peed on the lawn of the building next door. A cluster of friends, still bedecked in Pride gear, tromped by singing and laughing. They waved to Arthur, then stopped to pet Iggy, and Arthur was glad he’d pulled on his favorite hoodie, which was decent armor against most scrutiny. He was conscious of his crumpled jeans and his bedhead, the sneakers he wore without socks and the dazed smile on his face.

“Happy Pride,” he told them, as they turned to walk on.

One of the girls gave Iggy a final ear scratch, giggling as the mutt licked her cheek. “Did you decide to stay in this year?”

“Uh, something like that. I went to the city earlier.”

He saw her really _look_ at him then; she began to giggle harder. “Ohh. Nice. Is he sweet?”

“Come _on,_ Jen,” her friend pulled on her arm, then lifted her and twirled her in a circle while she shrieked with glee.

“Have an _awesome_ rest of your night,” Jen yelled from the end of the block, instigating another volley of well-wishing from the group. Iggy began to bark.

“You’re a very special dog,” Arthur told her, as they turned back toward their building. “I could be in bed with an extremely handsome man right now instead of out here with you, talking to drunk people.”

She skittered in a little circle, stepping on his feet, then bounded up to lick his hand. A typical, brazen lack of contrition. Arthur sighed and wiped his hand on his jeans.

Back in the apartment, Arthur found Eames stretched out in the middle of the bed, just looking around the room at Arthur’s things, one hand resting on his stomach—perhaps the most still Arthur had ever seen him. It didn’t look like he’d moved, not to put on his briefs or to toy with his phone. For a moment, Arthur wondered if he was actually asleep, but no—he met Arthur’s gaze easily, his eyes crinkling at the corners as he smiled. _He’s comfortable,_ Arthur thought, heart warm, _here in my room._

“Sounded lively out there. Make some new friends?”

Arthur snorted, pulled off his clothes, and climbed onto the bed to straddle Eames. “I want to find all your spots,” he murmured.

“You going to give me an examination, hm?”

He traced the blackwork feather that curled against Eames’s collarbone with his thumb. “Maybe I should. Return the favor.”

Eames yawned.

“Well, maybe in the morning,” Arthur conceded.

“C’mere.” Eames reached out for him. A flash of tentativeness was chased away by another yawn—or perhaps by how quickly Arthur complied, letting himself melt against Eames’s chest.

“We should shower before we sleep,” he said half-heartedly.

“Mm. Okay. Let me just close my eyes for a moment.”

Arthur smiled, wriggling to get comfortable stretched out at Eames’s side, his head on his shoulder. He hadn’t slept like this with someone in a long time, and despite his frequent fantasies of Eames curled up with him in his bed, he knew it ought to be more uncomfortable, a Tetris puzzle of elbows and awkward angles. It wasn’t. He pressed closer, pulled the blankets up around them, and let himself fall asleep.

 


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Woah, here it is, finished! Thanks to all the readers and commenters who offered such kind encouragement as this fic came together. (Even though I'm taking a million years to reply to comments, as is my awful habit with the stories that land closest to my heart, ahh!) This fic has been such a pleasure to share with y'all, and I've greatly enjoyed living in it these past months. 
> 
> Many thanks again to brooke for the initial prompt and to oceaxe for the helpful beta feedback on this final chapter. :) Oh, and, to all the folks who have offered their edits and insights on the different chapters: jambees221b, CoffeeWithConsequences, deinvati, and oceaxe.

 

In the morning, Arthur stirred and then jolted awake all at once, his pulse quickening as he felt the warmth of another body under the comforter pressed against his side. Eames, here in his bed. Arthur couldn’t help but stare. Eames was passed out on his stomach, one hand beneath his pillow, his other arm reaching into Arthur’s space, as if seeking him. Sensing Arthur’s movement or the weight of his gaze, he lifted his pillow-creased face and rolled onto his back with a little moan that made Arthur’s cock stir. He blinked at Arthur, smiling in that unselfconscious, still-half-asleep way—his pleasure at finding himself in Arthur’s bed unadulterated. “Hullo,” he murmured. Then he ran his hand over his face. “Mmff. Shit. Lost one of my contacts.”

“Here it is.” Arthur picked up the squashed lens from the wrinkled sheets between them.

Eames laughed as Arthur dropped the lens in his palm. “Hate when that happens. Be right back.”

Arthur propped himself up on an elbow to watch Eames stumble to the bathroom. There was a lot to admire about the view—Eames’s ass and thick thighs, his muscled back, one shoulder adorned with a tattoo of a leafy cluster of wild roses.

“So, how bad is your eyesight right now?” he wondered, when Eames had returned and re-settled under the sheets. He hadn’t fixed his messed up hair at all—it stuck out everywhere in adorable tufts. Arthur wriggled closer, and Eames pulled him onto his chest till their faces were close.

“Right…there,” he said. “I can see you perfectly now. Crisp and clear.”

“This is why I always found far-sightedness to be kind of romantic. You get someone kissing-close, and the rest of the world is just a blur.”

“Mmm.”

Arthur leaned forward to kiss Eames, morning breath and all. Things had just started to get urgent again—Arthur licking at Eames’s stubble, Eames working another bruise onto Arthur’s neck where his collar might cover it—when his phone began to vibrate on the nightstand.

“Do you need to get that?” Eames said, pulling back from marking Arthur with a sly smile that made Arthur wonder how big the bruise was.

“S’just my alarm,” Arthur panted. He reached for the phone blindly, knocked it onto the floor. Eames laughed, then obligingly held onto his waist while he flopped over the edge of the bed to pick it up. “Oh, shit, it’s getting late. I gotta meet Bea.”

“Where?”

“He’s getting dropped off at our cafe down the street.” Arthur sat up and began to untangle himself from the sheets. “We have time to shower though.”

“Oh, do we?” Eames ran a palm down Arthur’s spine.

“Yes, come on.” Arthur turned and grabbed his hand. “You should know this about me—I’m very organized. And good at scheduling.” He punctuated these declarations with kisses, pulling Eames to his feet.

Eames let Arthur lead him, the corner of his mouth curling up in an amused smile—like Arthur didn’t have to convince him that he was _capable,_ like he knew.  
  
  
  
  
When they finished showering and began to dress, Eames asked, “You wouldn’t happen to have—ah—a sweater or a hoodie or something I could borrow?”

“Worried about doing the walk of shame in your see-through shirt?”

He laughed. “A little.”

“I’m sure I have something.”

Eames trailed him to his closet. “Your place is so neat,” he commented. “You’ve really lived here four years?”

“B and I have been on a major organizing trip, getting rid of all the clutter, all the stuff we don’t need or totally love,” Arthur said, pulling his largest sweatshirt from a shelf. “Here—this might be tight, but I think it’ll fit.”

Eames pulled on the gray crewneck, asking, “What do you love—oh.” He gazed down at the UC Berkeley letters emblazoned across the front. “You went to Berkeley.”

Arthur shook his head. “Just for my social work master’s.”

“I don’t know if we count as true rivals then.”

“Stanford?”

“Yeah.”

Arthur wrinkled his nose. “Overachiever.”

“Don’t worry,” Eames said, stepping close and wrapping his arms around Arthur with a sigh—like it had been a bit painful, the two minutes they had spent without touch. “I had my train-hopping gadabout phase too. I was a very disreputable fellow.”

Arthur felt a stab of excitement. _I think I’m going to hear all about that,_ he thought, kissing Eames. _I think I’m going to get to know this man._

Somehow, they made it out the door and on their way in the next ten minutes fully dressed and having fed the dog—probably more of a testament to Arthur’s lengthening refractory period than his self-control.

“Wait,” Arthur said when they reached the end of the block, the light where their paths would diverge. “Are you okay to walk home without your glasses or—?”

“Oh.” Eames laughed. “Yeah. My eyesight’s not _that_ bad, don’t worry. I can’t read street signs, but I’m not going to walk into traffic.”

“‘Cause we could call you a Lyft or something—”

“It’s too pretty out not to walk.”  

Irrationally, it felt like the day at the MoMA, the two of them moving in different directions, perhaps never to cross paths again. Iggy was tugging him onward in their usual direction, but Arthur hesitated at the curb. “Do you—do you want to walk to the bakery with me first?” he asked. “We could get coffee before Bea shows up.”

“Yeah?” Eames grinned. “Alright. I’d love to see your special coffee spot.”

“‘Should warn you, it’s more of a special baked goods spot. But the coffee isn’t bad.”

“Baked goods. Even better.”

A couple blocks beyond the lake, there was a street lined with shops; the bakery had several outside tables, shaded by one of the avenue’s large oak trees. They walked up in time to claim an open one that a couple with a small child was vacating; Arthur knelt to slip the dog’s leash under the leg of one chair, then gestured toward the line inside. “Do you want to go in first? Iggy’ll bark if she’s left out here alone.”

“Tell me what you want, yeah? That’ll be faster.”

So Eames disappeared inside with Arthur’s coffee and pastry order, and Arthur settled himself at the small table, pushing up his hoodie sleeves in deference to the already-warm day. He unlocked his phone and began to check his text messages. Yusuf had texted him a thumbs up emoji at 2:36AM, which could be a statement on his night or on Arthur’s. Probably both. Ari, using her words, inquired, _Did you leave with Eames?! You left with Eames! How did it go? Amazing???_

Arthur texted back, _Pretty much, yeah. We’re getting coffee right now._

This news prompted Ari to unleash her own explosion of emojis. There were a series of hearts, a squinting smiley face, and a volcano. _OMG you had a SEX MARATHON, didn’t you?!!_

Arthur had to put his phone down on the table and look across the street, biting his lip, to keep from laughing. His phone buzzed. A text from Yusuf now: _SEX MARATHON?_

Iggy woofed, and Eames slid into the seat across from Arthur.

“Anything good?” he asked, as Arthur winced and flipped over his phone. “Here you go.” He deposited two brown bags of pastries and their to-go coffee cups between them.

“Just Ari and Yusuf heckling me—us—for our, uh, sex marathon.”

“I figured. The look on your face.” Eames grinned wolfishly, pushed Arthur’s coffee toward him.

Noting the time—Bea would get there in about twenty, thirty minutes, probably—Arthur shoved his phone in his pocket, then grabbed his coffee and sipped it, settling into his seat with a grateful sigh.

Eames stretched his legs out and began to tear into his pastry, a kind of cinnamon roll that was the co-op bakery’s specialty. They began to talk about the day before, to speculate on where their various friends had washed up at the end of the night, and then Eames asked a few questions about Arthur’s work. Arthur was about to tell him about his transition from being a therapist into QA, when over Eames’s shoulder, he saw Bea jogging up the sidewalk toward him, lugging a large plastic storage bin.

“Look!” Bea said, sliding the box on the table in front of Arthur. _“Sabta_ had more of grandpa’s camera stuff. She said I could have it!”

“That’s great,” Arthur said, “But I’m going to put the box on the ground, okay? It’s huge—”

Bea looked up, saw Eames, froze, then _screamed,_ jumping up and down. Caught off guard by the high-pitched shriek, Arthur tipped over his coffee.

“It worked!” Bea gushed, as Arthur chased the spill across the table with a handful of napkins. “It worked! Dr. Eames! You got my letter!”

“Hey dude,” Eames said, laughing. “It’s good to see you too.” He offered his fist, and Bea promptly gave him a fist-bump, still hopping with excitement.  

This was about the time Arthur realized that his mother was standing behind Beatrice.

Somehow Arthur had not imagined his mother would, like, arrive _with_ Bea. He had pictured her pulling to the curb in her old Volvo, dropping Bea off with a wave, driving away…

“Mom. Hey,” he said, more stiffly than he had intended. He put down the coffee-soaked paper napkins he was clutching and stood.

“Arthur.” After a moment’s hesitation, she stepped forward and gave him a hug, kissing his flushed face lightly. She looked nice, her salt and pepper hair in a French braid, her fleece jacket open over a gray shirt-dress.

“Mom, this is Eames,” he said. “He’s one of the doctors who worked with us earlier this year. One of the primary care doctors. He’s, ah…” Arthur trailed off, mind blanking. He’s—what? Should Arthur call him a _friend?_ Fuck.

“Your new boyfriend?” Bea asked into the silence, voice bright and smug.

Arthur gaped. _Et tu, Bea?_

Eames grinned, shaking his head slightly in a way that was more amusement at Bea’s cheek than negation. “I think we’re going to try for that, yeah,” he said, looking over at Arthur.

“Oh. Yes,” Arthur managed. “Yeah. That’s what we’re, uh, doing.” He realized he was smiling widely—an expression he had not shown in front of his mother in a long, long time, if the surprise on her face was any indication. He grabbed his righted coffee—the paper cup was still half full—and took a long drink.

Meanwhile, Eames and his mother shook hands. “It’s nice to meet you, Dr. Eames,” she said. “Please call me Catherine.”

“Catherine. Will you join us?” he asked, gesturing toward the table’s fourth chair.

“I—” She hesitated and looked over at B, who smiled at her. “Let me get some coffee first. Honeybee, would you like anything?”

Bea wrinkled his nose. “Yes, but I don’t think I can eat anything here.”

“Let’s go take a look,” she said, and they walked into the bakery, Bea shooting gleeful glances back over his shoulder at Eames as he skipped at her side.

Eames reached across the table and wrapped his hands over Arthur’s, which were still clasping his coffee cup tightly. “Are you okay?”

“Sorry,” Arthur said. “I, uh, did not expect my mom to show up. I thought she’d just drop Bea off.”

Eames tilted his head to the side. “I don’t mind.” He frowned slightly. “Do you want me to—?” He lifted his hands from Arthur’s, gestured vaguely in the direction of downtown.

Arthur blinked at him. “Oh,” he said. “Um, no. I didn’t mean—it’s not you, at all. My mom and I have a—a weird relationship. She wasn’t very accepting when Bea transitioned,” he said carefully, “but, uh, I think things are getting better. It’s just…very new.”

“Mm.”

Arthur let go of his coffee, and Eames took his hands and rubbed them, tracing the lines of his palms.

“I _am_ sorry though,” Arthur said. “I said, hey, let’s grab some coffee, not, hey, come meet my mother. That’s, like, a first date nightmare—”

“It’s okay,” Eames said. “I do want to date you, Arthur. I don’t have the delicate sensibilities of a one night stand.”

“The delicate sensibilities of a one night stand,” Arthur repeated, thoughtfully. “Needing to be shielded from the detritus and debris of my life.” He sighed. “And yet, my mystery was, like, seventy percent of my charm.”

“You can hook me with the other thirty percent.” Eames shrugged. “I have faith in your ruthless efficiency.” He raised his eyebrows at Arthur suggestively, and Arthur bit his lip, picturing how Eames had gasped and swore that morning, clutching Arthur’s shoulders with shaking hands while Arthur sucked him off in the shower.  

Of course this was when Bea and Arthur’s mom came back to the table. Arthur shifted, trying to banish the building arousal. Eames’s eyes were bright.

“I heard you two went to the movies yesterday,” he said, shifting gears neatly, as they both settled into their seats.

To Arthur’s surprise, the four of them sat and chatted very politely about the movie, the photography gear that B and his grandmother had found, and Bea’s experiments with taking pictures. After half an hour, when their coffee cups were empty and Bea had finished his cider, they meandered down the street to where Arthur’s mom had parked and said goodbye to her just as politely. She seemed genuinely pleased to have met Eames—which made even more sense once Arthur realized the last guy he’d introduced her to had been the punk musician he’d unsuccessfully snuck into his bedroom the Passover when he was twenty—and she shook his hand again warmly, before giving Bea a hug and Arthur another kiss on the cheek. Huh. Arthur couldn’t deny that he relaxed as soon as the goodbyes were over and she had driven off, but the encounter hadn’t been—well, it hadn’t been unpleasant.

Arthur mused on this as they continued their walk home. It was another typically gorgeous day, and he was happy to walk alongside B and Eames on the path around the lake, listening to them go back and forth about the latest editions of the comics they each pulled. Runners dodged them, and Arthur thought perhaps he’d join their numbers later. The musicians who usually gathered at the lake on the weekend were playing their drums, and people were barbecuing on the sloping lawns, many displaying Pride rainbows. When they reached Arthur and Bea’s building, Eames accepted Bea’s hug and insistence that he bring his Squirrel Girl trades next time he came over. He kissed Arthur quickly, before Arthur could agonize over what kind of goodbye gesture was appropriate, and then he was off down the sidewalk, waving. Arthur waved back—calmly, briefly—before unlocking the door to their building and ushering Bea upstairs. But on the inside, he was jumping up and down and squealing like B had done earlier. _It worked! I found him. I found him again._  
  
  
  
  
As soon as they were back inside the apartment, Arthur turned to Bea and crossed his arms. Bea was busying himself unclasping Iggy’s harness and hanging it on its hook beside the door. Arthur followed him to the living room and, when he flopped down on the couch, tried to loom with a look of stern parental disapproval.

“What?” Bea asked.

“‘Your new boyfriend’? Seriously, B?”

Bea smirked at him. “Well, I was right, wasn’t I?”

“That’s not the point. You, mister, are in trouble.”

Bea just grinned, kicking off his sneakers. They fell onto the floor, and the dog settled on top of them with a happy _whuff._ “Yeah? You gonna ground me?”

“Well.” Arthur thought about it. “I’m going to revoke your movie-choosing privileges for tonight.”

“Arthur!”

 _“And_ your takeout-choosing privileges,” Arthur added. He tossed his phone and wallet on the coffee table, then lifted Bea’s socked feet and sat down beneath them on his side of the couch.

Bea groaned. “You can’t! It’s my turn, fair and square.”

“Not anymore, it isn’t. We’re ordering Ethiopian and binge watching Inspector Spacetime.”

“Ughhh. Fine. Is Eames gonna come over?”

“Bea! No, I saw him literally five minutes ago, and we, like, _potentially_ started dating this morning. That would be—too much.”

“Whatever,” Bea said, muttering _potentially_ under his breath with a disbelieving shake of his curly blonde head. “So, are you going to spend the whole day texting with him then?”

“What! No.” Arthur’s phone lit up. He licked his lips. “Maybe.”

“Cool.”

“You do know I’m going to pay you back by being the most embarrassing parent ever when _you_ start dating someone, don’t you?”

Bea just smiled serenely, an unperturbed _do your worst_ smile. “Worth it, totally worth it,” he said. “Besides, maybe I’ll end up being aromantic.” He pulled out his phone and began to scroll through something, probably his Tumblr feed.

Arthur took a moment to study the small yet brilliant smile that hadn’t left his face since he’d discovered Eames at Arthur’s side that morning. Bea was so excited for him. _You better not fuck this up,_ chimed Arthur’s inner voice. _He’ll be so disappointed._ Arthur remembered the tentative way B had reached out to comfort Arthur in Dr. Cobb’s office when they learned that Eames was gone, touching Arthur’s arm, telling him it would be okay. _It’s fine,_ he told himself. _It is going to be okay. We’ll both be okay, whatever happens._

Arthur reached for his own phone in an effort to shake off such thoughts—and it worked. Ari had texted him a picture of he and Eames dancing together that made Arthur blush and curl his hand to cover his screen, even though Bea was on the other end of the couch. _LOOK AT HOW CUTE YOU ARE._ Arthur nearly snorted. They did not look cute; they looked like a hot mess, like people on the way to not wearing pants.

His heart thudded happily as he opened a message from Eames. Eames had already texted Arthur, _I had a lovely time with you last night and this morning._

 _I still can’t believe we found each other again,_ Arthur texted back. Bea was giggling and poking Arthur with one socked foot, but Arthur was ignoring him. _What are you doing the rest of the week? Do you want to meet up again?_

 _Yes,_ Eames replied immediately. _I’m working long shifts till Thursday, but I’m free after that._

“Arthur.” B poked him again with his toe. “Arthur. Can I sleepover at Evie’s on Friday?”

“Yeah,” Arthur said, staring at Eames’s message. “Okay.”

_What about friday?_

_darling,_ Eames said, _I cannot wait._

“Oh my God,” Bea laughed. “Your face is doing that thing again. You’re such a goner.”

Arthur tossed a pillow at him, but he didn’t argue. He was a goner for Eames, he really was.

That night, during the credits of the second episode of Inspector Spacetime they watched—when all the veggies, kitfo, and injera bread they had ordered had been devoured and Bea was dozing—Arthur got an email from his mother. He hesitated before opening it but decided there was no use putting it off, he should take the plunge. It was uncharacteristically short, a few lines expressing what a nice time she and Bea had at the movies and dinner—and how _nice_ it had been to meet Arthur’s new boyfriend, that he seemed like a very kind man. Arthur stared at the message for a long time, and then he wrote a similarly brief and gracious message back.  
  
  
  
  
  
When Arthur was thirty years old, he became deeply grateful for the spaciousness of the world. In particular, for the newfound sense of spaciousness in _his_ life—a sweet, sun-filled apartment with a magnolia tree in the front yard, its rooms divested of clutter, cozy yet plenty big for a pre-teen boy, a social worker, an itinerant doctor, and their dog to share. Bea’s black and white photographs hung on the walls of the living room. A mess of pillows and blankets from movie nights and Mario Kart tournaments on the couch. Takeout menus stuck to the fridge alongside B’s Polaroids. It all began to feel like home: dependable, comfortable, routine, yet full of small surprises.

When Arthur was thirty years old, his twelve year old nephew Beatrice became deeply grateful to have a mostly healthy body—which allowed him to run cross country in the spring, to spend Friday night skating at the ice rink with his friends, with only occasional relapses, weekends spent slurping soup and marathoning movies on the couch. He was grateful to be able to eat tacos again. He was grateful for his sleep apnea retainer, which allowed him to wake up rested after eight or nine hours of sleep. And he was super grateful, he told Arthur and Eames, as he tackled them with hugs on his way out the door to catch the bus to school, to, like, pretty much have two dads.

It really felt that way, especially after Eames moved into their apartment—like the three of them were a family.

Despite how well their relationship had been going, Arthur had been weirdly shy about asking Eames to move in. He’d never lived with a romantic partner before, and it wasn’t just _his_ home—there was B to consider. But Bea himself had issued the invitation one day with the bold insouciance of teenagers.

They were going into the city to the large photography collection on the Bay, nestled beneath the bridge, and had made a quick stop at the studio Eames was subletting downtown so he could change his clothes and pick up some books he wanted to return to the SF library. They nearly didn’t make the ferry, and after sprinting three blocks from their hasty parking job to the dock, up the ferry’s stairs, and onto its open air deck, Eames spent a good minute breathing heavily, leaning on the railing while giving Arthur’s hand a reassuring squeeze.

“You’re a doctor,” Arthur accused. “You shouldn’t be this out of shape.”

“Half the time I work in an office. Plus I stress eat when I’m away from you, darling. Now that I’m home you can make sure I get regular exercise, yeah?” He winked, lifted Arthur’s hand to his gorgeous mouth, and kissed his palm.

Bea pointedly reached up and pressed the button that activated the noise-canceling properties of his headphones. “Get a room,” he teased, voice now too loud, uncalibrated to the volume of their conversation. “Or better yet, just move in already.” He gave them a look, like _yeah, you heard me,_ and then crossed to the other side of the ferry deck, claiming he wanted a better view of the bridge and the sailboats gliding beneath it.

“Sorry, love,” Eames said, as Arthur reclaimed his hand and pulled a face. But as the ferry cut through the gentle waves of the Bay, Arthur wrapped his arms around Eames and pressed his face into his neck.

“You could move in, you know,” he murmured against Eames’s skin. “I’m not going to lie, I enjoy your sublets greatly—”

Eames chuckled, a wonderful vibration against Arthur’s cheek; his hands were tight on Arthur’s waist in that casually possessive way that Arthur loved so much. “I know you do, pet,” he said into Arthur’s hair.

“The privacy, the better soundproofing—”

“The zero fucks you give about the neighbors. God, you’re so loud. I love how loud you are.”

Eames’s hands on his waist tightened, and Arthur raised his face to kiss him, holding onto his lower lip with his teeth for a moment before pulling away. Eames was breathing heavily again.

“I’m going to make you do so much cardio,” Arthur promised.

“Darling. I thought we were staying at your place tonight.”

“Very quiet cardio.”

They kissed again.

“Bea’s right though. You’re—” Arthur felt blushy, self-conscious like when he’d first met Eames, even though Eames was right here in his arms, wet-lipped, looking at him with comfortable adoration. “You’re becoming part of our family, and I’m ready to wake up to you every morning—if—if that’s something you’d want.”

Eames didn’t hesitate. “I do want.”  
  
  
  
  
When Eames moved into their apartment, they had a rowdy, celebratory dinner party with Ari and Yusuf and the rest of their friends (including the uncle guy). Eames promptly, without trying, won the affections, heart and soul, of Iggy the dog—as effortlessly and completely as he had won Arthur’s. He fit into Arthur and Bea’s home, into their lives, as if he had always been there. Or, as Bea joked, as if the space they had cleared in their apartment during Bea’s illness had been created just for him and his boxes of sci-fi novels.  

Sometimes Eames took jobs outside the Bay Area for weeks at a time, but he had a filthy mouth and that low, rumbling voice that could shake Arthur apart during phone sex; besides, he never stayed away for long. One time, when Bea was at summer camp, Arthur traveled with him and spent three weeks luxuriating in the quiet of the San Juan Islands, exploring Seattle and the Puget Sound with Eames when they weren’t working. It was easier to have Eames gone when his things were around the apartment and their room—Eames’s faded red sweatshirt thrown over the back of the couch, his spine-broken paperback stashed under his pillow.

One night, Eames and Arthur were lying in bed so late that it was early, listening to the chime in the magnolia tree. Arthur had been awake for a while when Eames turned and nestled closer to him. “Hey baby,” he murmured, surprised. “You’re awake.” He wrapped an arm around Eames and began to run his fingers through his hair. “Time difference?”

Eames had just returned from a month in New York, where he had sublet an apartment with his sister, who was doing a writing residency there. “Yeah. Just thinking.”

“What about?”

“That day at the museum. How lonely I was before I met you.”

Arthur’s arms around Eames clenched protectively; he made himself relax. Never had Arthur been with someone who was willing to be so vulnerable with him, so honest. He got flashes of panic sometimes, that critical voice inside him insinuating, _You don’t deserve this. You don’t deserve him._ When Arthur told Eames about that voice, Eames told it to fuck right off.

“I was lonely too,” he admitted.

“I almost didn’t leave the house that day,” Eames said softly, speaking against Arthur’s chest. “I had a long weekend, four days before my next contract at UCSF started. The first day was fine. I cleaned my apartment top to bottom, listened to records, ordered takeout. Sat around in my tidy place eating BBQ in my pants, reading, thinking, _This is great, I love my life.”_

Mm. Arthur could picture that clearly. He smiled.

“My travel company called and offered me a contract in Boston. Said sure, bought a plane ticket.”

“Still in your pants?”

“Oh, yes.” Eames was tracing patterns on Arthur’s chest as he talked, little spirals and perhaps letters Arthur couldn’t identify.

“Sounds like a productive day.”

“Quite. Problem was, come six, seven o’clock, I started to get a touch antsy, tired of myself, you know? So I called up my mates from my residency, said what are you up to, I’m free tonight, and tomorrow, and the next day—”

“And the day after that?”

“Mmhm. But they were all busy—working schedules at odds with mine, having dinner with the girlfriend, or the boyfriend, or the husband. Exhausted from chasing around their sprogs, that sort of thing.”

Arthur made a distressed sound, and he pressed a kiss against Eames’s disheveled hair.

“S’okay,” Eames murmured. “They’re nice people, nice friends. Just not _around,_ you know. Not like your Yusuf, or Ari.”

“It’s hard to really know people when you aren’t around.”

“Well, and I’m not around much, I guess, and it seems to matter more now than it did three or five years ago. Life I chose.” He sighed inaudibly, but Arthur could feel the gust of hot breath on his bare chest. “I might not be around all the time, but I feel like I’ve always been _available_ to my friends, if that distinction makes sense? I don’t hide my heart away.” Arthur nodded, and Eames went on, “Anyway, the next day and the day after that, I did the same thing—ate takeout alone, worked out, lay in bed reading, ordering random shit off the Internet.”

“But on the fourth day…” Arthur said. He reached for Eames’s hand, and Eames laced their fingers together.

“On the fourth day,” Eames repeated, now drawing shapes on Arthur’s palm. “I almost didn’t get up, get dressed, or go outside. I thought, what’s the point? I’ll just read the next volume of the Inheritance Trilogy and take a nap, and then it will be tomorrow, and I can go to work again.” Arthur lined his fingertips up with Eames’s fingertips. “If I had done that, we never would have met.”

Arthur frowned. “We would have met. We still would have met that day at Pride. You there with Saito and Su, me meeting up with Ari.”

Eames hummed, shifted so that he was propping his chin atop his fist on Arthur’s chest, could look him in the face. Even in the dark, which was cut only by the glow of the street lamps and light pollution through the window, Arthur could make out Eames’s thoughtful expression—because he _knew_ Eames now, after more than a year of nights spent tangled like this. “Maybe. But I don’t think so. I think there was some magic, when we touched the sculpture together, when we saw the living wall.”

“When we placed our empty coffee cups in alignment,” Arthur offered.

“Probably that, yes.”

“What kind of magic?” Arthur loved Eames’s middle of the night theories.

“Mm. The magic of two people being willing to step out of their usual routines? Or—do you remember Sultan’s _look at that?”_

“Mhmm. Photography as a pointing finger. There’s something blunt and wonderful about _look at that,”_ Arthur recited.

“It’s fitting—that day, things felt different. Like they were worth seeing, the moments worth capturing. And you, how you looked at me…”

“You’re a doctor,” Arthur whispered. “People look at you all the time.”

It was true. Eames among his doctor buddies at Pride—the lot of them drunk and lounging, decked out in tank tops and feather boas and wonderfully indecent shorts—might have made a strong impression on Arthur, but he had also seen Eames amidst colleagues when he visited him on the general medical floor at UCSF. People didn’t just _look_ at Eames, they gazed, they hung on his words.

“That day at the museum—you made me feel worth looking at,” Eames said. “I remember when you picked up my glasses and put them back on my face—and what you said, that I needed someone to reflect my full self back to me, so I didn’t live in an echo chamber, didn’t disappear—”

“Into your white coat?”

“Yes, into my white coat, into the bottom of a Cup of Noodles…”

“Into season seventeen of Inspector Spacetime…”

“Hey now, that wouldn’t be a bad fate,” Eames said, and Arthur tugged Eames’s hand to him and kissed finger tips, his knuckles, his palm.

“I didn’t need just anyone though,” Eames said softly, picking up the thread of their conversation.

Arthur squirmed. “When did you fall in love with me?” he asked. “When I was ranting about differential diagnosis?”

“Mm. You had me at porno chic funk guitar.”

“Lovely.” He laughed. “Good to know even my moments of mortification are attractive.”

“What about you?” Eames asked.

“Oh. That day we went back to the MoMA, and you showed me [the installation with the pool of floating singing bowls](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mpwBbm22_y0) that I wanted to stare at forever. You sat next to me for a whole hour, nothing good to fidget with—”

“That’s untrue. I was fidgeting with your hand.”

“Well, you sat there with me that whole time. Fuck, I don’t know what I’m saying, I was crazy about you already then.” Arthur pulled Eames up higher across his chest to kiss him. “You know, I think the magic was that we pulled ourselves together and went to the museum anyway, alone,” Arthur whispered against his mouth. “Like you went out, you were saying, I deserve to see this art, this beauty, to look and be looked at out in the world. You were affirming your worth.”

“We both were.”

“Yes.”

“You’re a good therapist,” Eames murmured, kissing him again.

Arthur sighed into the kiss. “A good quality assurance reviewer.”

“That, and a good therapist. You’ll always have it in you, love.”

Arthur rolled them over, so Eames was on his back, then slipped down his body to settle between his legs and swallow his cock. Sometimes Arthur loved him so intensely, he wanted to take him till he was choking. He just wanted all of Eames, every of inch of him that he could get—wanted to make him as overwhelmed with pleasure as Arthur was overwhelmed with affection for him.

After, they fell asleep how Arthur liked best. Not spooning, Eames’s broad chest solid against his back, his knees against the backs of Arthur’s—what Arthur would have supposed he’d favor, before—but facing each other, hands loosely tangled. Sometimes they slept with Arthur pressed forward, face to Eames’s chest, sometimes nearly nose to nose, breathing on each other. Arthur would wake up, and he would lie still watching Eames’s eyelashes flutter, thinking about how even in sleep, pulled far apart from each other in separate worlds of dreams, they gravitated toward each other, needing to touch.  
  
  
  
  
A year and change after that, Eames was making dinner while Arthur and Bea sat at the counter on their laptops, working—Arthur with half an ear tuned to a radio program on the day’s latest political disasters, Bea deliberately drowning out said program with his now-perpetual headphones (a true fourteen year old). Groaning, Bea threw down his headphones and the notes he had been scanning.

“I’m so sick of school,” he griped. “Worksheets and book reports and power point presentations. I wish I could, you know, study volcanoes in person instead of making a fucking power point about them. The world’s going to end in a fucking nuclear explosion, and middle school is all I’ll ever have experienced.”

“Language,” Arthur said.

Eames tried to be fancy flipping a pancake—breakfast for dinner was his specialty, endured by Arthur at least once a week—and flipped it onto the floor, much to the delight of the dog. He spoiled that dog rotten, and Arthur and Iggy were both convinced he dropped food on purpose to treat her. Arthur hid a smile behind his hand and turned to his exasperated nephew.

“Well, you know I can do my job from the beach, so I’m down,” he joked.

“Me too,” Eames said, destroying another pancake. “I’d rather live beneath an active volcano than in this trash fire.”  

“Oh my God, can this be serious?” Bea fixed round eyes on them that quickly dropped to his screen as he began to frantically Google. “Can we move to, um, Iceland? Or New Zealand? Can you take us to home with you to London, Eames?”

Eames laughed. “It hasn’t been _home_ for a decade. Which might be enough time for a volcano to spring up in Hammersmith without me noticing.”

“You know, it’s a decent idea,” Arthur said slowly. “You get to travel around the States all the time. Maybe it’s time Bea and I got to travel too.” Arthur’s tone was light, but he doubted it did much to cover the worry that he’d been living with as the government intensified its disgusting posturing, threatening to strip the rights of trans people. He met Eames’s steadying gaze, which reflected his concern for Bea and their broken world. Maybe it was time he and Bea saw a bit more of that world, while they could.

“Wouldn’t you miss your friends?” Eames asked B.

“I can talk to them online. They can come visit me for summer break. I can make new friends,” he gushed. _“Please.”_ He whirled toward Arthur. “You’re always talking about how school gets in the way of learning. How I should be ‘learning in the world.’ Wouldn’t it be _awesome_ if we could go to art museums in different cities, or, like, study different ecosystems up close by going on hikes and stuff—” 

Arthur laughed. “Okay, okay.” He put up his hands. “Let’s think about it, okay? It would take a lot of planning.”

“We’d have to get Iggs here a dog passport,” Eames mused.

Iggy whined, beating her tail against the kitchen tiles, then gave a happy bark.

Arthur narrowed his eyes. The griddle was empty again. “Oh my God, Eames, if you feed that dog another pancake, I’ll—”

“You’ll what, love?” Eames grinned at him.

“I’ll have to come supervise.” He shut his laptop and moved around the counter, wrapping his arms around Eames’s waist.

“Oh, excellent,” Eames said, reversing their positions easily, twirling Arthur under his arm like they were dancing. He pushed the wooden spoon that was dripping with batter into Arthur’s hand and kissed Arthur’s neck, the tender place that always made him shiver. “Will you be a dear and make me one that’s shaped like a dinosaur?”

“Ohh, can you make me dinosaurs too, Arthur?” Bea asked, eyes still glued to his computer. “I want a T-Rex and a stegosaurus.”

Arthur rolled his eyes and tried very, very hard to keep from smiling, but it was a lost cause. “Eames?”

“I would also like a stegosaurus,” Eames murmured against Arthur’s neck, very serious.  

Arthur turned his head to catch the corner of Eames’s beautiful mouth in a kiss.  
  
  
  
  
Later that night, Eames arched beneath him. Gasping, he asked, “Where would you want to go?”

Arthur kissed his collarbone tattoos, his chest where his heartbeat was loudest, his navel, his hipbone—carefully, lingeringly, like plotting a course on a map. “To Sarajevo to see my—my other family. Iceland, to see the lights and the Library of Water. The Hebrides. New Zealand. The beach somewhere.” He kissed Eames’s inner thigh, the scars on his knees, his ankle where his skin was pale and his veins showed blue. Eames reached for his hand, and Arthur laced their fingers together. “Anywhere we can live on the beach.”

So they packed up their stuff, donated the rest, and wound their way around the globe—the three of them, plus the dog, together.

 

END.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Random credit where credit is due: I snagged the premature ventricular contraction thing from that rom-com _No Strings Attached,_ which could have been good if it weren’t so problematic in its depiction of queer people, sigh.
> 
> End notes: In my early-mid twenties, I got really sick like B does in this story. I tried to draw on my experience to write a realistic narrative of Bea and Arthur’s struggle with differential diagnosis, but it’s been a few years since I (kinda, most days) started to feel better, and I know I’ve forgotten many details about the various tests, results, and recommendations that I waded through to become well. If you are knowledgeable about medical things and spot errors, I’d love to know so that I can (try to) fix them. <3
> 
> On that note, I should also say that one of the amazing nurses I work with was kind enough to answer my endless questions about travel contracts and working at hospitals during our slow moments on our unit this past fall, and the second and third chapters in particular owe much to her patience. I’ve realized that the contract/visiting system for traveling doctors within hospitals is more complicated than I’ve captured here (like, especially internationally, lol); apologies for any inaccuracies.
> 
> I remain deeply grateful to the kind (and sorta Eamesian :)) locum tenens doctor whose cameo in my primary care physician’s office changed my life. <3
> 
> You can find me vaguely on tumblr [here](http://coffeecupandcorgi.tumblr.com). If you enjoyed this fic and want to read the next A/E piece I'm pouring my sweat and tears into, it's called _The Lady and the Knight,_ and you can find it [here](http://archiveofourown.org/works/13001493/chapters/29729544).


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